REWARD AND TRAINING PRACTICES ADOPTED BY PRINCIPALS FOR ENHANCING TEACHERS’ WORK ATTITUDE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN ANAMBRA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Secondary school teachers’ persistent lateness to work, absenteeism and other forms of misconduct in Anambra State, Nigeria seem to put the capacity of principals in managing human resource, in doubt. This prompted the researchers to investigate reward and training practices adopted by principals for enhancing teachers’ work attitude in secondary schools in Anambra State, Nigeria. Two research questions guided the study and two null hypotheses were tested. The descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study comprised 6,654 respondents (258 principals and 6,396 teachers) in the 261 state government owned public secondary schools in Anambra State. Multi-stage sampling procedure was used to draw 672 respondents (51 principals and 621 teachers) as the sample for the study. A researcher-developed questionnaire titled ‘‘Principals’ Reward and Training Practices Questionnaire (PRTPQ)’’ was used for data collection. The instrument was validated by three experts. The reliability of the instrument was ascertained using Cronbach Alpha which yielded an overall reliability of 0.77 for the instrument with coefficients for the clusters being 0.78 and 0.75 respectively. The researchers together with five research assistants collected data for the study. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while t-test was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed among others that the reward practices adopted by principals for enhancing teachers’ work attitude in secondary schools include: recommending outstanding staff for promotion, issuing of commendation letters to dedicated staff and that training practices they adopted include providing opportunities for members of staff to attend seminars, organising orientation programmes for new staff in school, encouraging members of staff to attend conferences and supporting staff to undertake refresher courses. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others thatthe State Government should collaborate with the Ministry of Education to work out modalities for teachers’ professional advancement in the teaching profession through training in form of workshops and symposium that will refresh their mind on those concepts, ideas, skills, methods and practices which they learnt in school.