PERFORMANCE OF PART-TIME TEACHING STAFF AND ITS EFFECTS ON UNIVERSITY PERFORMANCE, A CASE OF UNIVERSITIES’ IN NAKURU TOWN

Abstract

Quality in higher education has been important for decades. In Kenya, quality in universities was embraced some years back by facilitating the vigorous vetting of programmes; matching the programmes with the existing capacity and competent sourcing of human resources to run the programmes. Part-time employment has thus become a common phenomenon in the higher education sector in Kenya. With the increase demand of education in Kenya, most universities have established many satellite campuses so as to take their service to the people without considering the availability of the qualified teaching staff in the country and their ability to pay them. This study focused on the performances of part-time teaching staff and its effects on the performance of universities. The specific objective of the study was to establish the effect of Part-time staff turnover rate on the university performance, to examine the effect of part-time teaching staff service delivery on university performance, and to examine the effect of teaching competence of part-time staff on the university performance. To achieve the objective of the study, descriptive research design method was used. The study focused on all the universities in Nakuru town. The respondents targeted were head of departments, departmental heads in the universities. The target population was 37 head of departments. Simple random sampling procedure was used to select the sample. Data was collected using Questionnaires and analyzed using both Descriptive and Inferential statistics with the aid of statistical package for social sciences. The result findings showed that turnover (r=.503, a=0.005), Service delivery (r=.803, a=0.01) and Competence (r=.688,a=0.001) were positively correlated to part-time lecturers performance in the universities. Multiple regression analysis showed that turnover (β =0.134), Service delivery (β =0.600) and competence (β =0.170). These results further indicated that part-time lecturer dispense their duties professionally and provided quality services thus striving to achieve high performance levels. The study recommends the university to prepare lecturer evaluation sheet which allow the student to evaluate the lecturers based on their performance Further research should be conducted in the entire country with the incorporation of more variables such as rewards and compensation.