The effect of motivation on employee performance in local governments. A case of Amuria District Local Government

Abstract

This study examined the effect of motivation on employees’ performance in Local Governments, taking Amuria District Local Government as a case study. The study was guided by three specific objectives namely; to examine the effect of rewards system on employee performance, to determine the effect of working environment on employee performance and to assess the effect of training and development on employee performance. The study utilized primary data collected from the employees of Amuria DLG. Simple random sampling and stratified random sampling techniques were employed to the targeted 44 employees of Amuria DLG to participate in the study. A structured questionnaire consisting of closed ended questions was used to obtain the required data and SPSS 23.0 software was used to analyze the data.

According to the result of the study, the response rate was 100 percent and majority of the respondents (70.5 percent) were male. At the bivariate level of analysis, employees’ performance was established to have a significant positive relationship with the independent variables (reward systems, working environment, and training and development). Furthermore, at the multivariate level of analysis, the study revealed that, for every one unit improvement in the; reward systems, working environment, and training and development, there was a predicted increase of 0.491, 0.565, and 0.525, respectively in the log odds of being at a higher level on the employees’ performance.

Therefore, the study concluded that; reward systems, working environment and training and development had a positive influence on the employees’ performance in Amuria DLG however, their influence on the performance of employees were not significant at 5 percent level of significance. Based on the findings of the study, the researcher recommends that more effort should be devoted on motivating the employees in order to increase their performance as this will in the long run lead to improved service delivery due to the improvement in staff performance resulting from job satisfaction created by motivation. The researcher further recommends that future studies should consider extending the study to other institutions that were not included in this study like; Non-Governmental Organizations, other public institutions, and private companies in the country to ascertain whether the variables in this study also affect the employees’ performance there.