Mentoring Effectiveness and Job Satisfaction of Library Personnel in Private Universities in South-West, Nigeria

Abstract

The concept of job satisfaction, though not new, remains crucial as employees are expected to have a sense of personal fulfillment in carrying out their day-to-day activities. Unfortunately, literature suggests that some employees may not be satisfied with their work. Although several researchers have investigated job satisfaction of library personnel, little or no attention has been accorded mentoring effectiveness as it relates to job satisfaction of personnel in Nigerian libraries. To fill the gap, this study, therefore, investigated mentoring effectiveness and the job satisfaction of library personnel in private universities in South-west, Nigeria. The survey design was adopted for the study. The study population comprised of 323 library personnel in private universities in South-west, Nigeria. All members of the population were enlisted to participate in the study due to the manageable size. A questionnaire titled “Mentoring and job satisfaction questionnaire (MJQ) was used for data collection. Descriptive statistics of frequency distribution was used to analyse the demographic information of the respondents, mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions, while multiple regression was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that majority of the respondents are satisfied to a large extent with their jobs using both intrinsic and extrinsic measures. Major areas of satisfaction were found to be: being able to do things that don’t go against one’s conscience, relationship with co-workers and making use of one’s ability while the least areas of satisfaction had to do with working alone, feedback on performance and policies attached to promotion/pay. Mentoring was also found to be mostly effective. The least areas of effectiveness were, however, in providing motivation and giving opportunities for sharing career progress with co-workers. A positive relationship was found to exist between mentoring effectiveness and job satisfaction. Based on the findings, the study concluded that mentoring is central to job satisfaction. It, therefore, recommended that university libraries strengthen the effectiveness of mentoring programmes through workshops and seminars so that mentees can get the chance to share work experiences with others, among others.