Abstract

As a result of lack of adequate research efforts linking the psychological variables to workers institutional performance in Nigerian polytechnics, this study, therefore, investigated the extent to which psychological variables such as: motivation, work-self efficacy, innovative work behaviour organisational citizenship behaviour predict perceived institutional performance of polytechnics in two State-owned Polytechnics in Southwestern, Nigeria. The study adopted the descriptive survey research design. Purposive and simple random sampling techniques were used to select 174 senior staff and 86 junior staff from the polytechnic, Ibadan, Oyo state and 50 senior staff and 20 junior staff from Osun State Polytechnic, Iree, Osun state. Psychological variables predicting institutional performance questionnaire ((r=0.82) was used to obtain data for the four research questions raised to guide this study. Data were subjected to Pearson Product Moment Correlation and multiple regression analysis. Results obtained showed that psychological variables significantly predicted institutional performance of state-owned polytechnics (F (9,953) =64.03; p<0.05) and jointly accounted for 27.1.0% of the variation in the dependent variable. Similarly, institutional performance correlated with psychological variables in the following order: innovative work behaviour (r=0.52, p<0.05), organisational citizenship behaviour (r=0.34, p<0.05), motivation (r=0.31, p<0.05) and work-self efficacy (r=0.30, p<0.05). Based on these findings, it is recommended that polytechnics in Nigeria urgently need to institute greater motivational/reward system which will help promote and enhance creativity, innovation, and institutional citizenship behaviour.