ABSTRACT

Workplace spirituality is a new management paradigm that elicits workers’ self-imposed willingness to act and perform their task productively in an organisation due to their perception of the meaningful nature of work in an egalitarian community that allows self expression. However, the role of workplace spirituality and employee commitment to trigger high performance among employees in Nigerian Universities has not been explored. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to comparatively investigate the effect of workplace spirituality and employees’ commitment on performance in Ajayi Crowther University (ACU) and Federal University Technology, Akure (FUTA). As a result, the three dimensions of workplace Spirituality: meaningful work, Inner life, and Sense of community and two elements of employee commitment: affective commitment and continuance commitment were used to examine their effects on employee performance.

Based on this, a survey design was applied, and questionnaires and interviews were used to gather data from a total of 363 Non-Academic employees in ACU and FUTA in the categories of Administrative, Technical, and Secretariat. While the instrument was validated by experts, its reliability test carried out revealed an average result of 0.8 Cronbach’s Alpha. In analyzing the data for this study, simple percentage count and linear regression analysis were used as statistical tools.

The findings revealed that the three dimensions of workplace spirituality and two aspects of employee commitment have positive and significant effect on employee performance in both private and public institutions. The only exception to this was meaningful work with P=0.085>0.05 that showed no significant effect on employee performance in the private institution. A test of perceptual difference between private and public Universities on workplace spirituality and commitment on employee performance was conducted. The result indicated that employees from both institutions perceived workplace spirituality and commitment differently.

The study concluded that workplace spirituality and employee commitment which are strong determinants of employee performance should be intentionally encouraged by Human Resources Managers, Head of departments, Policy makers and Management practitioners since it can cause a positive and significant change in the performance of employees in an organisation. As a result, an environment that makes employees to have a felt belongingness, and perception of job as vocation for self-expression should be encouraged.

Keywords:      Workplace, Spirituality, Employee, Commitment, Performance

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