Stakeholder Support Drives Academic Staff Performance in Nigerian Public Universities, Study Finds

A new study from Nigerian public universities has found that academic staff performance is significantly shaped by the support they receive from key stakeholders, including government agencies, university administrators, private-sector partners, and students. The research, published in Frontiers in Education, reveals that institutional training and development programmes serve as the crucial bridge through which stakeholder support translates into measurable improvements in teaching quality, research output, and community engagement. The findings carry direct implications for the delivery of Sustainable Development Goal 4 in resource-constrained higher education systems across sub-Saharan Africa.

The study, led by Oladejo Olufemi Michael of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, together with colleagues from Rhodes University and York St. John University, set out to investigate how and to what extent stakeholder support influences faculty performance within resource-limited settings. Grounded in Stakeholder Theory and Social Exchange Theory, the research tested five hypotheses using a quantitative design. Data were collected from 197 academic staff across three public universities in South-West Nigeria: the University of Ibadan, Lagos State University, and Federal University Oye-Ekiti. These institutions represent three distinct generations of Nigerian higher education, providing a broad view of the academic experience across diverse institutional histories.

The researchers employed stratified random sampling to distribute 256 questionnaires, of which 202 were returned, yielding a response rate of 78.9 per cent. After excluding five partially completed questionnaires, 197 fully usable responses remained. The sample size proved adequate for the analytical technique employed: Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling, conducted using SmartPLS 4. Applying the 10-times rule recommended for this method, a minimum of 40 cases was required given the maximum of four predictors pointing to any single endogenous construct. The achieved sample exceeded this threshold by approximately five times.

The measurement instrument comprised four latent constructs assessed on a five-point Likert scale. Key Stakeholders’ Support was measured with seven items and demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.934. Training and Development Plans comprised four items with an alpha of 0.813. Training and Development Programme included five items with an alpha of 0.881. Academic Staff Performance was captured through six items measuring teaching quality, research output, and community service, with an alpha of 0.880. All constructs exceeded recommended reliability thresholds, and discriminant validity was confirmed using the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio, with all values falling below the 0.85 threshold.

The results revealed a significant direct effect of stakeholder support on academic staff performance, with a path coefficient of 0.423, a t-value of 5.935, and a p-value below 0.001. This finding aligns with Social Exchange Theory, which holds that social behaviour is governed by the norm of reciprocity. When academic staff perceive their institutional environment as genuinely supportive, they reciprocate through greater performance effort. The f-squared value of 0.215 represents a medium effect size, indicating that the overall quality of the stakeholder support environment is itself a meaningful organisational resource for academic staff, independent of any training infrastructure it may enable.

Perhaps the most structurally important finding concerns the relationship between training and development plans and training and development programmes. The path coefficient between these two constructs was 0.709, with a t-value of 16.272 and a p-value below 0.001. The f-squared value of 1.012 indicates a large effect size. This path explained 50.3 per cent of the variance in training and development programmes. The researchers interpret this as evidence that once rigorous planning is properly funded, translation into action follows smoothly. The primary bottleneck, they argue, is not the conversion of plans into active programmes but the failure of institutions to produce adequately resourced plans in the first place.

The study’s fourth hypothesis confirmed that training and development programmes fully mediate the relationship between training and development plans and academic staff performance. The indirect effect was significant at 0.210, with a 95 per cent confidence interval of 0.090 to 0.353 that excludes zero. Critically, the direct path from training and development plans to academic staff performance was not significant, indicating that plans alone produce no measurable performance benefit. Full mediation through programme execution is the decisive pathway. Together, stakeholder support and training and development programmes explained 56.2 per cent of the variance in academic staff performance.

A further exploratory finding emerged from the fifth hypothesis, which tested a feedback path from programme execution back to stakeholder support. The path coefficient was 0.511, with a t-value of 5.662 and a p-value below 0.001. This finding extends Freeman’s instrumental framework and adds nuance to Mitchell, Agle, and Wood’s salience theory by suggesting that visible programme quality can reinforce stakeholder commitment rather than being solely a precondition for programme delivery. The researchers argue that when universities successfully translate plans into programmes, the visible quality of those programmes strengthens the confidence of key stakeholders, who in turn intensify their support. This virtuous cycle has not previously been documented in the African higher education literature.

Data collection observations suggest that government and university administration, despite their formal authority, are among the least effective providers of support in practice. Students, by contrast, contributed meaningfully through informal encouragement and advocacy. The researchers note that these observations are descriptive and exploratory, as the study measured stakeholder support as a composite construct and cannot produce differential structural path estimates by stakeholder type. They recommend that future studies disaggregate this construct into separate sub-constructs for government, university administration, private sector, and students to formally test whether differential effects exist.

The study carries several practical implications for university leaders and policymakers working to advance SDG 4. The researchers argue that policy documents and strategic plans are necessary but insufficient. Decisive progress depends on funded, executed, and monitored training programmes backed by coordinated multi-stakeholder commitment. They recommend that government agencies and institutional funders secure adequate budgets before rolling out new programmes, that university administrators foster supportive climates through transparent resource allocation and meaningful recognition of academic labour, and that institutions establish coordination platforms to align the contributions of all four stakeholder groups around shared professional development goals integrated with SDG 4 monitoring frameworks.

Subject of Research: Higher Education Research

Article Title: Future proofing the academy: the nexus between stakeholder support and academic staff performance

Article References: Olufemi Michael, O., Sybert, M., Nene Ernest, K., & Olayiwola Idris, G. (2026). Future proofing the academy: the nexus between stakeholder support and academic staff performance. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1857809. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1857809

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1857809

Keywords: academic staff performance, stakeholder support, SDG 4, Nigerian public universities, training and development, PLS-SEM, Stakeholder Theory, Social Exchange Theory, higher education, sub-Saharan Africa, Future, proofing