STRESS MANAGEMENT AND PERFORMANCE OF PUBLIC UNIVERSITY LECTURERS IN SOUTH EAST NIGERIA

Abstract

Stress is a complex and dynamic phenomenon, and organizations need to recognize that employees' overall performance is impacted by unwelcomed stress levels. Organizational goals must be achieved, and stress-influencing factors need to be addressed if work is to be completed efficiently. This study was carried out to examine the impact of Stress Management on the Performance of Public University Lecturers in South East, Nigeria, the purpose for which was to ascertain certain component in the job that causes stress for the academic staff. This study employed the descriptive survey design, the study concentrated on ten public universities in the South East, Nigeria. The population of the study consisted of only academic staff of the public universities in the South Eastern region of Nigeria, involving Professors, Readers and Senior Lecturer and Lecturer 1 made up of Four Thousand Eight Hundred and Seventy-One (4871), as extracted from University Personnel Offices. Two methods of data collection involving quantitative and qualitative method were adopted for this study. The quantitative method made use of questionnaire, and the questionnaire designed was the likert-style on a 5 point scale, the scale was measured with options such as strongly agreed (5-SD), agreed (4-A), undecided (3-U), disagree (2-D) and strongly disagreed (1-SD). The research hypotheses were tested at 5% level of significance. Analysis was carried out with the aid of statistical package of social sciences (SPSS) IBM version 25. The finding of the study revealed that work overload management has a significant positive impact on job satisfaction of public university lecturers at a value of 65%, also that role conflict management has a significant positive impact on personal behaviour at a value of 64% which is greater than 0.50 or 50% but not more than 1.0 or 100%. The study recommended amongst others that University management should encourage the continuous mandate on team teaching in order to help the lecturer reduce to a barest minimum the volume of work that they do from time to time.