Revisión de la Revista Árabe de Negocios y Gestión

Reward Systems in the Public Universities in Kenya: Implication on Retention of Teaching Staff

Abstract

Okinyi OM

The rate at which employees quit their jobs in an organization is in many ways indicative of either misunderstandings or availability of better opportunities. Public universities in Kenya have for a long time experienced several instances of exit by qualified teaching staff. With the ever increasing demand for university education in Kenya, public universities have been destabilized due to the lack of enough qualified teaching staff. Public universities still rely on the government to reward their staff. Reliance on the government for remunerating staff has led to a situation where employees are not paid well as their counterparts in the more developed societies. Many professors have therefore decamped to other countries in search of better pay, affecting the teaching needs of Kenyan universities. The problem of academic staff retention is a global one which affects both developing and industrialized countries. This study sort to find out whether rewards offered to teaching staff by public universities affected their retention in the university. Stratified random sampling was used to sample teaching staff from three public universities who gave responses that were analyzed to give the findings. Individual university administrators from each of the three universities provided information regarding employee policies and other issues that could not be captured from the teaching staff. A sample of 153 teaching staff was selected from a population of 1000 teaching staff to give responses. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used in data analysis where Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS) version 19 was used to analyze the data. Conclusions and recommendations were made based on the analysis.