“One Size Fits All”: A Fallacy in Measuring Staff Job Satisfaction—Monetary Recompenses Examined in the Ugandan-Based Chartered Private Universities

Abstract

While looking at the senior academic staff in chartered private universities in Uganda, the study intended to establish if the homogeneous motivation model of using money as a sole predictor of job satisfaction fits the unique characteristics of the employees for whom it is intended. Using a mixed-method explanatory sequential approach, both numerical and interview responses were obtained from a statistically representative sample of 136 and 12 key informants, respectively, from six chartered private universities. At the univariate, bivariate, and multivariate levels, data were analyzed using SPSS16.0 software. Results indicated that monetary recompenses such as salary and allowances did not significantly and positively affect employee job satisfaction since the $p$ values were higher than the calculated probability of 0.05, which was the minimum level of significance required in this study to declare a significant effect. The interview responses on the effect of salary and allowances were equally corroborated with the numerical data. However, bonuses were found to have a positive influence with corresponding positive remarks from the interviews. Although there are noticeable flashes of scholarly rigor in the existing body of literature that is skillfully threaded and cogently argued to support monetary incentives, contextual realities on the ground suggested otherwise. Senior academics have continued to quit work despite reasonable pay. Regrettably, at the time of this study, the human resource officers were confident that the ultimate drive for work is money. Little did they know that monetary recompenses have limitations in influencing senior academics. It is thus recommended that the idea of lumping employees into a homogeneous entity with no regard to their uniqueness and the existing individual differences among them is long outdated and deserves no space in modern human resource practices.