Academic staff creativity and organisational communication at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria

Abstract

The study examined the role of academic staff creativity in promoting student excellence at Bayero University Kano, Nigeria. The creativity styles questionnaire revised by Kumar and Holman (1997) and the communication satisfaction questionnaire by Seven (2012) were adapted. The Amabile’s componential theory of creativity guided the study through a mixed-method convergent research design. Three proposed factors of creativity were examined, namely organisational communication, creative process and task motivation. Data were generated from a survey of 378 academics, drawn from a quota sampling process, and a series of semi-structured interviews with three participants. The data were analysed using Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) to test the hypothesised model. The quantitative research results revealed that all proposed factors are statistically significant predictors of academic staff creativity accounting for 92% variance explained by the proposed model. In addition, it was also found that the level of academic staff creativity was below the moderate level of 2.06, a finding established via an analysis of all means. Findings from the qualitative analysis depicted that academic staff needed to be motivated into reflecting on student excellence. The study concluded that task motivation is the strongest factor in explaining staff creativity. Future studies applying the proposed model are therefore recommended to be conducted at the institutions of higher learning across Nigeria in order to verify these findings and to enrich the current literature on academic staff creativity at tertiary institutions in the country.