WORK-LIFE BALANCE AND CAREER SUCCESS OF ACADEMIC STAFF IN PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES IN NIGERIA
Budding concerns have been raised by scholars on the perceived failure of academic’s career and the dare financial, social, and psychological consequences they are faced with. The paper focused on investigating the link between work-life balance and career success of academic staff of Nigerian Public Universities. Work-life balance was operationalized with Job-sharing, and telecommuting, while, career success was measured with meaningfulness and promotion. The population of the study consist of 6,836 academic staff. A sample size of 256 representing (68%) success rate were retrieved. The study adopted a descriptive survey design. four hypotheses were raised and analyzed using Spearman Rank Order Correlation Coefficient for the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. Findings showed that Job sharing showed a negative but significant relationship with meaningfulness but showed a positive and significant relationship with promotion, Nevertheless, telecommuting showed no significant relationship with meaningfulness and promotion. Based on the result, the study conclude that work-life balance is significantly related to academic’s career success. The study recommends amongst others that to reduce stress load and create balance in academics work and life domains, university management should resort to alternative work arrangements like job-sharing which has proven to add meaning to academic work- life. Also, that telecommuting practices should be discouraged in public universities that have not embraced e-learning since academic’s peculiar work nature would require contact with students, as is evident in the current study.
Keyword: work-life balance, career success, Job-sharing, telecommuting, meaningfulness
