Moonlighting Among University Lecturers and Their Performance in the South-Western Nigeria

The study examined the performance (in terms of teaching, project supervision and paper publications) and moonlighting among university lecturers in south-western Nigeria. Subject for the study were three hundred and forty-seven lecturers drawn from four public and two private universities in the south-western zone of Nigeria. The stratified random sampling technique was used in the selection of respondents from the rank of assistant lecturers upward. The questionnaire method was used to collect relevant data for the study. Data collected were analyzed using percentages, correlation analysis, t-test and two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The hypothesis tested showed that there is significant difference between the performance of the university teachers who moonlighting and those who do not in south-western Nigeria (t=3.51; p<0.05). The findings revealed that there is inverse relationships between the number of lecture hours and number of universities lecturers teach in (r=-0.137, -0.447; p<0.05). It also showed that there is significant difference in performance in terms of project supervision (F=7.687, 8.175; p<0.05), and number of paper publications (F=2.678, 4.581; p<0.05). The human resource management implication is that it is essential to design, implement and monitor, with the full participation of lecturers, effective, efficient and mutually reinforcing working condition sensitive policies and programmes, including development policies and programmes that will foster the empowerment and advancement of lecturers within the institution they are and at the same time train more hands for the universities to have enough lecturers to go round to prevent lecturers’ moonlighting.


Introduction
The issue of performance of lecturers in Nigerian universities has been a burning one for some time, especially with regards to quality teaching, research, and public service.It has become an issue of serious concern because apart from the quality of graduates which is allegedly being challenged in the international labour market and by many foreign universities, Oyaziwo, (2009) feels that majority of the universities are not making any impact in the socio-economic and political development of a country like Nigeria that is yearning for development.Indeed, the deterioration in scholarship in Nigerian universities is widely acknowledged (Oyaziwo, 2009).
Although public universities have dominated the higher education landscape in Nigeria for several decades, their failure to cope with admission pressure became more critical in the later part of the 1980s.In 1990, about 250,000 candidates applied for admission, and less than 50,000 (about 20 percent) were admitted.In 1992, close to 300,000 applied for admission and about 50,000 (17 percent) got admitted.In 1994, out of the 400,000 that applied, less than 50,000 (13 percent) were admitted.This has been the trend over the years on the average; the access rate has been as low as 13.7 percent (Obasi & Eboh;2004).By 2002, the access rate had fallen to less than 13 percent (Okebukola, 2002).Based on this fact, the expansion of access through the establishment of private universities became one of the most reasonable policy options (Obasi, 2004a;2005c).
Private universities are a recent development in Nigeria as compared to the federal and state government owned universities.It has evolved during two historic phases: the first during the second republic under President Shehu Shagari administration 1979Shagari administration -1983 (all facilities) (all facilities).The second phase was during the fourth republic under President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-Date).During this phase necessary machineries were put in place to visit and scrutinize applications from individuals, religious and corporate organizations of who are applying for private universities operating license.
To Belfied and Lerin (2003), private universities are non-public or independent universities who do not receive governmental funding and are usually administered by denominational or secular boards; others are universities operated for profit.Ndebbio (1983), Olaniyan (2001), also refer to private universities as those universities that are solely owned, financed and managed by private individuals with intention to recover cost in short time and make profit.The first federal university was established in 1948 (University of Ibadan), while the first state university was established in 1979 Private Universities in Nigeria-the Challenges Ahead 16 (Rivers State University of Science & Technology, Port Harcourt).However, the first set of surviving private universities were established in 1999 (Igbinedion University, Okada, Edo State, Babcock University, Ilisan-Remo, Ogun State, and Madonna University, Okija, Anambra State) this was according to Obasi (2006) as a result of the public failure theory expounded in classic literature as we have in Mexico and Peru and the demand absorption as public university education falls short of new demand.
In spite of the fact that universities are rapidly springing up, the number of lecturers are few and hence, the available hands to teach in these universities are not likely to be enough.High labour turnover among university teachers in Nigeria is now a thing of the past because the lecturers in Nigerian universities are no longer leaving for greener pastures abroad.Many now have multiple income sources by teaching in many universities at the same time.The agitation for sabbatical leave is on the increase and, it is now spent in universities within the country.It is also not a crime to be an associate lecturer in other universities while still fully on ground in their home university.The new universities are employing new graduates and others; they however need the old, experienced hands especially professors.The few numbers of professors in the country most times, are being engaged on part-time basis not only because of their experience, but also for accreditation purposes as well as image laundering.
However, having to teach in many places (moonlighting), this paper assumes, might have many implications on the health and consequently on the performance of these Nigerian university lecturers.This paper opines that academically, these newly established universities will place a burden on the lecturers, which in turn may adversely affect their health, ability and productivity both in their home universities and in the ones they go for extra work and pay.It will not be an overstatement to say that the quality of teaching might decrease.The time available for administration and research might also reduce.The inelastic supply of Ph.D degree holders to teach in Nigerian universities as it is, coupled with the increasing number of universities; the demand for university teachers has drastically increased thereby worsening the shortage of university teachers in Nigeria.The question that then arose from this is can teaching in more than one university affect the performance of lecturers?
There are very few studies that address the impact of lecturers' teaching in many universities on their performance; hence this paper becomes very important.This study attempts to contribute to existing knowledge and research by adopting a previously under-emphasized perspective: the examination of lecturers' performance as a phenomenon of lecturers' moonlighting in Nigeria.

Research Objective
The objective of the paper is to evaluate the performance of lecturers who teach in more than one university vis-à-vis those who do not in the south-western Nigeria.

Research Hypothesis
The following hypothesis was postulated for this paper: There is no significant difference between the performance of lecturers who teach in more than one university and those who do not in south-western Nigeria.

Literature Review and Conceptual Framework
Quality of academic staff is one area where some controversies do exist.Sofola (2005) posits that most, if not all private universities in Nigeria, have 'a lower proportion of seasoned and experienced teachers.'But the verdict of the National Universities Commissions' (NUC, a Nigerian federal government's agency charged with the regulation, accreditation, and monitoring of public and private universities) accreditation exercise reported earlier contradicts this observation.In more specific terms, as at 2002, Madonna University, Okija for instance, had 80 full time academic staff and 35 part time staff.Those with doctorate degrees were 30 in number.Then at the Benson Idahosa University, Benin, there were 56 full time academic staff and 30 part time staff with 40 staff having doctorate degrees.The Igbinedion University, Okada had 78 staff, while Bowen University had 80 (Okebukola, 2002).These statistics are not disappointing at all given the relatively young age of private universities in Nigeria.This evidence does not reflect the view that 'the pool of qualified staff working full time in the private institutions is small' (Thaver, 2004).
Contemporary educational theory holds that one of the pivotal causes of poor school performance is the inability of schools to staff classrooms adequately with qualified teachers (Boe & Gilford, 1992).These scholars in their study opined that staffing problems were primarily due to shortage of teachers, which, in turn, is related to increased teacher retirements and student enrollments.They also suggested that subsequent shortfalls of teachers could force many school systems to resort to lowering standards to fill teaching openings.This will inevitably result in high levels of engaging unqualified part-time teachers and lower performance.
Concern over the inability of universities in Nigeria to adequately staff classrooms with qualified lecturers has since been discussed as a major educational problem, and has received widespread coverage in the national media.This is because the university system has been the target of a growing number of reforms and policy initiatives, and the subject of a substantial body of empirical research.Very many of these analyses have attributed teacher shortages to teacher turnover-the departure of teachers from their teaching jobs (Grissmer & Kirby, 1987, 1992, 1997;Heyns, 1998;Mumane, Singer, & Willet, 1998, Ologunde, 2005).

Moonlighting
According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2009), Moonlighting means working at a secondary job, to work at another job, often at night, in addition to one's full-time job.In the Industrial Relations & Human Relation (H.R.) Terms, if employees are spending long hours moonlighting, it means the organization is being short-changed.Some start their moonlighting activity as a hobby and later realize they can turn a pastime into lucrative, supplemental income.Employees engage in part-time work elsewhere to earn additional income as a surviving strategy.
Moonlighting is a chronic problem, one that has hurt the efficiency of public services.Employees must spend extra time doing their extra jobs instead of completing their tasks.Most employers would agree that working for other organizations or undertaking re-training during periods of sick leave for example is an unacceptable situation which could have a detrimental impact on businesses.
It is widely known that most teachers of the public university regularly "moonlight" (illegally hold another job) in the private university.Just as a government servant cannot hold another job in addition to the one in government, so must the teacher in the public university because his/her job is a full time one.The consequences of public university teachers moonlighting are extremely adverse because it not only deprives the students that they are supposed to teach; such "moonlighting" also has been identified as a major cause of the sessions jams that takes away from the students vital years of their lives.In fact, if a public university teacher can "moonlight" with such adverse impact to the students for whom the university is established in the first place, then there is no reason why the government servants should not be allowed to hold a second job or even a third one outside his government job.But then even thinking that a government servant should be allowed to "moonlight" will be only in a fit of insanity.In case of the Public University teacher moonlighting, the thought of it should also be in a similar fit of insanity.But then sadly and unfortunately, these teachers have been doing such "moonlighting" from the time the private universities have come on the scene.
As far as Serajul (2009), is concerned, university is meant to be a place of study and research.A university teacher cannot have any other preoccupation that impedes his duty to the students which is teaching and his duty to himself and the university that employs him which is to do research.No university in the world employs a teacher for consultancy, "moonlighting" in another university, appearing in a talk show, etcetera ignoring or avoiding his teaching and research responsibilities.A nephew of Serajul , who is now a Professor in a Canadian University once complained to him that he has been placed by his university in a difficult situation as it has asked him to become the Chairman of the Department.In astonishment Serajul asked his nephew why?He says that the responsibility will interfere adversely with his research work where he would not be able to devote the time that he wanted.There is no doubt that if university teachers in the developed world were aware of what is happening in the universities in the developing countries and its teachers, where teachers desperately fight each other to become heads of departments and deans; they would be forced to believe that we are talking about universities on some other planet.
It has generally been observed that research in Nigerian universities systematically declined and collapsed from the Late 1980s up to date.Summarizing the factors that contributed to this decline from the late 1988 to 1996, and subsequent collapse from 1997 to date, the Nigerian Universalities' Commission listed the following as inhibiting factors: 1. Difficulty in research funding, 2. Lack of research skills in the modern methods, 3. Constraint of equipments for carrying our state-of-the art research, 4. Overloaded teaching and administrations schedules, which give little time for research, and, 5. Diminishing scope of mentoring researchers, due to brain drain (Okebukola, 2002).This paper however is not attributing lecturer shortages to turnover, but to the fact that these university lecturers might be forced to take on part-time teaching in other universities (moonlighting) as more and more universities are established without a conscious effort at the immediate training of Ph.D degree holders to teach in these universities.The establishment of more universities no matter how desirable without regard to the available human resources might affect the performance of existing lecturers.

Conceptual Framework
Cole ( 2004), stressed the fact that Human resources are the most dynamic of all the organization's resources.They need considerable attention from the organization's management, if they are to realize their full potential in their work.Thus, anything that may affect their performance must be included in the issues which have to be faced by management.Most of these issues like motivation, communication, payment systems, training and development have already been considered in literature.Other factors that may affect performance of lecturers include management and administration, welfare of staff and students, availability of other extra sources of income, specialized skills, unattractive conditions of work, assessment and promotion of lecturers, workers' and students' attitudes, infrastructures and facilities, ethnicity and appointments, and a host of other variables.This triangular relationship is illustrated in figure 1.
However, Lussier (2000) believes that performance is the means of evaluating how effectively and efficiently managers use resources to achieve objectives and that an important part of determining performance is measuring and controlling it.The performance formula proposed by Lussier was that performance is based on ability (a), motivation (m) and resources (r) P= f (a, m, r).If any of these three components are low, performance will be negatively affected.When a performance problem occurs, managers need to determine which component of the performance formula is the reason for the performance level and take appropriate action to correct the problem.
This study however is much how lecturers can be made to put in the best ability to do their work well with the provision intervening variables like motivation and the availability of the resources with which they perform their duties (i.e., proper human resource development), having been faced with the temptation to take up more teaching appointments with the new universities springing up.

Expansion of Universities
Intervening Variables

Research Design
This paper employed survey research and comparative research designs as it attempted to look at what is happening presently to university lecturers because of moonlighting and compare their performances in the area of research, teaching and community services.

Area Descriptions
This study was conducted in the Southwestern part of the country.This was because, out of the six geo-political zones in the country with 104 universities in all as at the time of study, the South-west zone alone has 33 universities (about a third of the total number of universities in the country).

Population, Sample Size and Sampling Technique
The population for this study consisted of Nigerian university lecturers in the South-western part of the country.To ensure adequate representation of the samples, the universities were stratified by: 1-geographical location (States), 2 -ownership, (Federal, State and Private Universities) and; 3-type (conventional and specialized universities).To ensure a good spread across the region, one university was selected from each of the six states in the zone.Official figures from the six universities as at January, 2011 put the total population of academic staff at over three thousand.Using 10% sample size determination formula, 347 copies of the questionnaire were distributed and used for the analysis.

Research Instrument and its Administration
The main instrument for this paper was a self-designed and self-administered structured questionnaire titled "Lecturers' Performance Questionnaire (LPQ)".The questionnaire consisted of two parts: The first part elicited information on the demographic characteristics of respondents.The second part contained questions in close-ended form on the respondents' perception of the effects of moonlighting occasioned by the expansion of universities on the performance of the university lecturers.Care was taken to ensure that the various cadres of academics (Professors, Readers, Lecturers I, II and Assistant Lecturers) from different departments were adequately represented.

Techniques
Data generated were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistical techniques.Specifically, simple percentages, analysis of variance, chi-square and t-test were used for the analysis.

Results
In order to compare the performance of lecturers that teach in more than one university to those that teach in only one university for both public and private universities, the means of their performances were generated and analyzed using means, correlation, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and the t-test.

Performance Based on Hours of Lecturing per Week
Table 1a showed that lecturers of public universities that teach in one university lectured for 11.51 hours per week on the average, those lecturers that teach in two universities lectured for 11.55 hours per week on the average, while lecturers that lectured in three and four universities lectured for 7.18 hours and 8 hours per week respectively.Lecturers of private universities that lectured in only one university spent 17.50 hours per week, those that lectured in two and three universities spent 9 hours and 5.25 hours per week on the average respectively.Furthermore, Table 1b gave linear correlation coefficients (R) of -0.137 and -0.447 for the public and private universities respectively, which implies that there is weak negative relationship between hours of lecturing per week and the number of universities in which lecturers lectured in both in the private and public universities.This implies that the higher the number of universities in which a lecturer lectures in, the lower the number of lecturing hours per week in each of the universities.

Performance Based on Number of Students' Project Supervised
Table 2a showed that public universities lecturer that lectured in one university supervised 13 students' projects on an average, those that lectured in two and three universities supervised 23 and 22 students' project on the average, those that lecture in nine universities supervised 20 students' projects on the average.The lecturers of private universities that teach in one university supervised 7 students' projects on the average, while those that teach in two and three universities supervised 10 and 26 students' projects on the average respectively.The result of the Analysis of Variance, which is used for testing whether there is statistically significant difference in the mean performance of the two categories of lecturers in Table 2b showed the groups mean difference of F-value of 7.687 with the P-value of 0.000 for public universities (F= 7.687; p< 0.05), which is significant at 5% level of significance.This confirmed that there was a significant difference in the performance of the lecturers that lectured in one university and those that lectured in more than one university in public universities.Also, comparison of difference in means of the lecturers in private universities showed that there was significant difference in the performance of lecturers that lectured in one university and those that lectured in more than one university (F= 8.175; p< 0.05).This result shows that the number of universities lecturers teach in will significantly affect their level of performance when measured in terms of students' project supervision.The measure of association in Table 2c revealed coefficient of correlations of 0.236 and 0.459 for public and private universities respectively.This implies that there is a weak positive relationship between the number of students' project supervised and the number of universities in which the lecturers lecture in public universities and moderate positive relationship for that of private universities.Thus, it can be inferred that the higher the number of universities in which a lecturer lectures, the higher the number of students' project to be supervised which may have significant negative impact on performance.

Performance Based on Number of Publications
Table 3a showed that lecturers of public universities that taught in one university have 13 publications on the average, those that lectured in two universities have 12 publications on the average, those that teach in three universities published 18 papers on the average, while those that lectured in nine universities published 7 papers on the average giving average publications of 13.5 papers for lecturers in public universities.Lecturers of private universities that lectured in one university published 5 papers on the average, while those that lectured in three universities have 2 publications.Table 3b gave a clearer indication.The F-value reported for the model is 2.678 for public universities with the P-value of 0.028 (F= 2.678; p<0.05) and the F-value for the private universities is 4.581 with the P-value of 0.015 (F= 4.581; p<0.05) which were significant at 5% level of significance.Based on the analysis, it can be inferred that there was significant difference in the number of publications made by the lecturers that teach in one university and those that teach in more than one university in the two categories of universities.

Hypothesis Testing
The hypothesis states that there is no significant difference in the performance of lecturers who teach in more than one university and those who do not.
To test this hypothesis, the mean performance of lecturers in both the public and private universities in the areas of teaching, services and publications for those lecturing in only one university and those lecturing in more than one universities were obtained with their standard deviations.A t-test was calculated based on these figures.A summary of the results is presented in Table 4.The t-test difference between the performance of university lecturers that teach in one university and those that teach in more than one university revealed a difference with t-value of 3.51, which is significant at 0.05 level of significance (t=3.51;p<0.05).This implies that moonlighting among lecturers significantly affect their performance.In summary, the analysis showed that if lecturers engage in moonlighting, their performance as an academic will be significantly affected.Teaching in more than one university will negatively affect lecturers' performance.

Discussion
The findings of the study showed that if lecturers teach in more than one university, their performance as academician will be significantly affected negatively.That means teaching in more than one university will negatively affect lecturers' performance.This corroborates the findings of Oyaziwo (2009), Ekaette (2006);and Sofola (2005).The first finding showed that that there is weak negative relationship between hours of lecturing per week and the number of universities in which lecturers lectured in both in the private and public universities.This implies that the higher the number of universities in which a lecturer lectures in, the lower the number of lecturing hours per week in each of the universities.This is true as most of the senior cadre lecturers (especially professors) were the one that engage in moonlighting, while lower cadre lecturers are loaded with much works thereby denying them the opportunity of accepting jobs outside the universities they are employed.The result also showed that the higher the number of universities in which a lecturer teaches, the higher the number of students' project to be supervised, which may have significant negative impact on performance.This validates the findings of Sofola (2005) and Ologunde (2005).The result further showed that there was significant difference in the number of publications made by the lecturers that teach in one university and those that teach in more than one university among the two categories of universities.Those that teach in one university have more paper publications than those that teach in more than one university.
Universities are established with the sole objective of advancing the propagation and dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of humanity with a view to producing middle and high level manpower for the rapid growth and development of nations.Of the varied factors contributing to the attainment of the above objectives, human resource is the most critical.Universities must attract, develop, motivate and maintain an energetic workforce to support the attainment of their mission and vision with a view to gaining competitive advantage.
Competitive advantage is simply defined as anything that gives an organization an edge over its competitors.The unique talents among employees, including flexibility, innovation, superior performance, high productivity and personal customer service are ways employees provide a critical ingredient in developing an organization's competitive position (Porter, 1985).How well universities perform their mission and accomplishes their vision and goals of effective service delivery is of paramount concern.Improving administrative capacity and especially, those aspects dealing with human resource offers the most challenge for improving the effectiveness of the Nigerian University System.Human Resource Management (HRM) enhances employee productivity and the ability of universities to achieve their mission.
Based on the findings of this paper, the following recommendations are drawn:  School management must be very effective in interpersonal relationships as well as building and nurturing participatory team.The skills that are important for deans and heads of departments, apart from the technical knowledge and decision-making skills that they require include communication, motivation and negotiation, energy, enthusiasm, and even temperament, self-confidence, reliability, maturity and emotional stability, a constructive, positive attitude, independence tempered by political awareness and flexibility and tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.This will improve the performance of the generality of lecturers in their domains.


It is essential to design, implement and monitor, with the full participation of lecturers, effective, efficient and mutually reinforcing working condition-sensitive policies and programmes, including development policies and programmes, at all levels that will foster the empowerment and advancement of lecturers.


The challenges or difficulties faced by lecturers in their fields of endeavours to source for the funding for their activities are enormous; therefore, there is need by the government to establish special funding agencies that will be specifically designed for the funding of research activities carried out by various lecturers.


It is also paramount to conduct a needs analysis to gather information about the knowledge and skills that are needed to improve the performance of lecturers and ultimately of the university as a whole.


A high pay level strategy (monetary motivation) may be chosen when management believes that if it maintains high salaries, the university will attract and retain the best lecturers within the university.This is known as the "golden handcuffs"

Conclusion
From the findings of this paper, any effort directed at improving the performance of lecturers in the university must be rooted in identifying the appropriate educational policies that will help to achieve desired goal of lecturers' performance in the area of research, teaching and community services.Any efforts that ignore the human resource management implications of moonlighting among lecturers may miss critical issues in understanding the forces underpinning the performance of lecturers in Nigerian universities.

Table 1a .
Hours of lecturing in a week in each university

Table 1b .
Measures of association

Table 2a .
Number of student's project supervised in the universities

Table 2b .
ANOVA table (performance of the lecturers that lectured in one university to those that lectured in more than one university based on the number of students' projects supervised)

Table 2c .
Measures of association

Table 3a .
Number of publications

Table 4a .
T-test showing the effect of teaching in more than one university on performance

Table 4c .
Mean Difference between the performance of those who lectured in one and more than one universities