Outcomes of job autonomy and its effect on work engagement: A study of the banking industry in Nigeria

  • Received July 8, 2021;
    Accepted September 10, 2021;
    Published October 4, 2021
  • Author(s)
  • DOI
    http://dx.doi.org/10.21511/bbs.16(3).2021.16
  • Article Info
    Volume 16 2021 , Issue #3, pp. 173-183
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

An individual’s ability to exercise freedom in how he/she plans his/her work is referred to as job autonomy, and this is associated with many positive work outcomes. Work engagement is a positive work outcome that many organizations desire to see in their employees due to its impact on productivity. This study was carried out to examine the extent of job autonomy in ensuring that banking industry employees in Nigeria attain a certain level of work engagement. The study used a mixed investigation method, including both quantitative and qualitative research techniques. The quantitative analysis involved the distribution of 438 copies of the questionnaire, of which 353 copies were retrieved from bank employees. For a qualitative assessment, 15 respondents were randomly selected from among the senior officers of the selected banks. Data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (PLS). As a result, job autonomy was found to be stronger with cognitive engagement (β = 0.524, Tval = 6.268, P = 0.000) and emotional engagement (β = 0.440, Tval = 4.372, P = 0.000) than with physical engagement (β = 0.341, Tval = 2.485, P = 0.000). This implied that though job autonomy had a significant influence on employee work engagement, the aspects of scheduling work and making decisions were weak areas. This study concludes that there is a need to rethink the decision-making element in the banking system, given that the workplace is tilting to a more dynamic and flexible culture, fueled by digital innovation.

Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the support of Covenant University, Ota (Nigeria), both financial and in provision of other educational resources, in making this publication possible.

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    • Figure 1. Predictive relevance (path co-efficient) of job autonomy and employee work engagement
    • Table 1. Factor loading for job autonomy in the selected Nigerian banks
    • Table 2. Path coefficients for job autonomy and employee work engagement
    • Table 3. Summary of regression job autonomy and employee work engagement
    • Conceptualization
      Olukemi Ade-Adeniji, Anthonia Adeniji
    • Data curation
      Olukemi Ade-Adeniji
    • Formal Analysis
      Olukemi Ade-Adeniji
    • Investigation
      Olukemi Ade-Adeniji
    • Methodology
      Olukemi Ade-Adeniji
    • Project administration
      Olukemi Ade-Adeniji
    • Resources
      Olukemi Ade-Adeniji, Anthonia Adeniji, David Imhonopi
    • Writing – original draft
      Olukemi Ade-Adeniji
    • Funding acquisition
      Anthonia Adeniji
    • Supervision
      Anthonia Adeniji, David Imhonopi
    • Validation
      Anthonia Adeniji, David Imhonopi
    • Writing – review & editing
      David Imhonopi