A Study of Superior-Subordinate Relationship and Employees’ Commitment to the Core Beliefs of Organisation in Public Universities of Southwest, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper empirically analysed the concept of superior-subordinate relationship and employees’ commitment to the core beliefs of the organisation in the public universities of Southwestern, Nigeria by identifying various key issues in superior-subordinate relationship and employees’ commitment; determining the effect of the superior-subordinate relationship on employees’ commitment and also investigated the extent of the effect of superior-subordinate relationship on employees’ commitment as well as the role of leadership styles in subordinates’ commitment and those challenges encountered in the course of instituting acceptable superior-subordinate relationship and employees’ commitment. The population for the study has a total number of twelve public universities in the Southwestern, Nigeria (Federal and State) with 12,346 academic staff from which a total number of 1,440 respondents were chosen i.e 120 respondents from each of the universities representing 12% of the population through the purposive sampling technique with reference to the stratified sampling procedure which ensures proportional representation of the population sub-group and random sampling technique was used in the course of administering the questionnaire to 1440 respondents. The result of the findings showed that the correlation between superior-subordinate relationship and employees’ commitment was a positive but it was a weak relationship at 0.05 level of sig. thus, recommended that the culture of the organisation should be designed and tailored along the tradition, values, norms and beliefs of the people in that environment for acceptability of the ways things are being done in the organisation in order to sustain relationship and commitment.