ABSTRACT

Abstract

The study examined the influence of transformational and transactional leadership on motivation of academic staff in Nigerian universities. Descriptive survey design was used for the study. The study drew the sample of 10 universities in the south west Nigeria, five state owned and five federal owned, 100 lecturers from each university, which amounted to 1000 lecturers using simple random sampling technique. The study developed and used two sets of questionnaires tagged “Transformational and Transactional Leadership Questionnaire (TTLQ)” and “Motivation of Workers Questionnaire (MWQ)” with reliability coefficient (r) of 0.75 and 0.72 respectively. The study used multiple regression analysis for the data analysis. While the null hypotheses developed for the study were tested at .05 level of significance. The findings revealed that both transformational and transactional leadership contributed significantly to the motivation of academic staff in Nigerian Universities. It is therefore recommended among others that Nigerian universities need transformational leaders who possess high degree of integrity and are motivated to lead people to higher levels of performance towards achievement of educational goals.

Keywords: Leadership; Performance; Universities; Motivation; Lecturers.