Principals' Motivational Strategies and Teachers' Job Performance in Public Secondary Schools in Kaduna State, Nigeria

This study investigated the relationship between principals' motivational strategies and teachers' job performance in public secondary schools in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Two objectives, two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study, focusing on principals' recognition strategy and welfare strategy as predictors of teachers' job performance. The predictive correlational research design was adopted because it enables the researcher to establish not just association but the extent to which an independent variable forecasts a dependent variable. The population comprised 8,540 teachers drawn from 375 public secondary schools spread across the 23 Local Government Areas of Kaduna State. Using Taro Yamane's formula at a 5% margin of error, a sample of 382 teachers was drawn through a multi-stage sampling technique that combined stratification by senatorial zone with simple random and proportionate sampling. Data were collected using a researcher-designed instrument, the Principals' Motivational Strategies and Teachers' Job Performance Questionnaire (PMSTJPQ), whose construct validity was established by three experts in educational management and measurement and evaluation, and whose reliability, determined through Cronbach Alpha on a pilot sample, yielded coefficients of .81, .79 and .86 for the recognition, welfare and job performance sub-scales respectively, with an overall index of .84. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while simple linear regression was used to test the hypotheses at the .05 level of significance. Findings revealed that principals utilised recognition strategy (grand mean = 3.22) and welfare strategy (grand mean = 2.86) to a high extent, and that both recognition strategy (R² = .375, F(1,358) = 214.66, p < .05) and welfare strategy (R² = .237, F(1,358) = 111.14, p < .05) significantly predicted teachers' job performance. Both null hypotheses were rejected. The study concludes that principals' motivational strategies are strong predictors of teachers' job performance in Kaduna State and recommends deliberate policy attention to structured recognition schemes and improved welfare packages for teachers.