Workers productivity enhancement in nigeria: evidence on mentorship in a nigerian university

The quest for increased productivity at firm level up to (sub) national (city and regional scale and country) is a challenge that has attracted the interest of academics from multiple disciplines: from management to administration of publics in both private, governments, civil society and non-government, community and faith based organizations. The issues have been examined theoretically through prisms of the classical management administration propositions to the modern (human relations and human capital) perspectives. In addition to clarifying underlying concepts and factors considered as drivers of enhanced productivity in this article. We employ the descriptive case study method to empirically study the mentorship scenario in the University of Calabar, Faculty of Social Sciences’ journals published from the early 2000s to the early 2010s. Our findings show that there was neither a discernible trend indicating increase nor decrease of mentorship over the study period. However, mentorship of junior academics by their senior colleagues was poor throughout the study period with marked variation by years. Gross abdication of mentorship responsibility occurred in June 2009, coinciding with issuance of two issues of the faculty’s existing journal. Serious abdication of mentorship responsibility occurred in three episodes (June 2009, and January 2010 and 2002), respectively, very serious abdication of mentorship twice: 2012 and January 2005. Mentorship was not reflected in the publications of 2011 and 2004. The implications of the foregoing findings for policy in the studied University’s Faculty is that mentorship planning and management must be undertaken as an urgent and imperative strategy of imparting academic research skills, knowledge and experience for contributing towards enhancing productivity in the faculty, university wide and beyond – where similar failures are likely to be occurring.