A Comparative Study of Factors Influencing Male and Female Lecturers’ Job Satisfaction in Ghanaian Higher Education

Abstract

The study sought to compare factors influencing male and female lecturers’ Job satisfaction. Cross-sectional survey designs employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted for the study. Simple random sampling was used to select 163 lecturers from the four oldest public universities in Ghana. Celep’s (2000) Organisational Commitment questionnaire and the Job Satisfaction questionnaire which is unknown were adopted for data collection. Also, an open ended questionnaire was used based on the research questions. The open-ended questions were used to buttress the large quantitative responses to ascertain the validity of the responses given. Findings revealed that there was no significant sex difference in job satisfaction and organizational commitment among the lecturers. Correlational analysis also revealed that job satisfaction correlated significantly with organizational commitment (i.e. commitment to occupation, commitment to school and relationship with lecturers). On the contrary, ‘commitment to teaching’ did not significantly correlate with job satisfaction. Interestingly, this problem of construct validity was confirmed when the qualitative response to whether the lecturers in our study sample were satisfied with their jobs elicited positive responses. Multiple regression analysis revealed that both Commitment to school and Commitment to teaching predicted job satisfaction. Findings were therefore discussed in relation to the recommendations and limitations given in this study.

Keywords: job satisfaction, commitment to teaching, commitment to school, commitment to occupation, relationship with lecturers