Job Crafting as a Sustainable Tool for Improving Performance among Lecturers of Public Universities in Kano State, Nigeria

Abstract

As the most populous state in Nigeria, whose 70% is under 30 years old, Kano has a large youthful population that signals substantial and ever-increasing demand for university education; and the academics deal with heavy academic responsibilities, increasing expectations for research visibility and collaboration, infrastructural constraints and concerns regarding academic performance. With no quick fix in sight, proactively shaping, redefining and redesigning their jobs remains a viable option for the lecturers to optimise their performance. But very little is known about this behaviour by the Kano lecturers. Thus, this paper examined the effect of job crafting behaviours on the performance of the lecturers of public universities in Kano. Responses from 349 lecturers were mainly analysed using regression analysis. Among the findings are that although all the dimensions of job crafting have positive and significant affects on employee performance. Task Crafting behaviour proved to have the highest effect on the performance of the lecturers. The paper recommends that the Management of the universities should encourage lecturers to redesign appropriate aspects of teaching, assessment, supervision and research activities to complement formal academic standards rather than conflict with them. so as to optimize the mutual gains of job crafting. Also, based on the relative low effect of Relational Crafting, the universities should promote formal mentoring, peer-learning and research-collaboration structures with emphasis on new lecturers who may need guidance on high impact researches and publications, grant applications and academic networking – for better performance and general academic excellence.