CHAPTER ONE

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY:

The word leadership has been defined by many scholars particularly in the field of public administration, to be one who exerts influence or makes things happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. If the leader causes changes that he intended, he is said to have exercised power, but if he causes changes that he did not intend or want, he has exercised influence but not power (McFarland 1969).

Chukwuemeka (2008) defined leadership simply as the art or process of influencing people.

Generally leadership has to do with influence and power, and any person who is endowed with these qualities in the context of a group, community or Nation has the personality of a leader. There are different types of leaders, some of which include intellectual leadership, opinion leadership, group leadership, social leadership, executive leadership, and administrative leadership.

Leadership can also be looked at from their styles and task. Fiedler (1969) identified two types of leadership which include task oriented leadership and interpersonal relations oriented

leadership. He also identified three leadership styles (based on the use of authority) which include autocratic leadership, democratic leadership and independent leadership. But in this work, we shall categorize leadership into two types which are common in contemporary African societies, we shall consider their attributes and how they affect changes in the society.

According to Dike (2003), he identified two types of leadership that is common to African society. These are instrumental leadership and societal leadership. The main concern of the instrumental leader is how to use his office/position to achieve personal gains/goals (personal, close friends, cohorts, etc) community or National objectives are secondary to him. He may not be lacking in social or community commitment, but in practice, he gives more considerations/attentions to self over the interest of the society he governs. Such leaders will hold on to power for as long as their selfish private objectives are achieved. They do not care whether the community or region derives anything/benefit from their rule or not.

The “societal” leader on the other hand is a public servant first and only secondary a private person. He uses his position to promote community or national objectives. For him, power and influence are important only if they can be used to solve societal or human problem. He is ready to resign when he is convinced that he cannot influence changes to the benefit of the public. Given the antecedents of the nation’s post and present leaders, it is clear that the majorities of them were and are still, instrumentalists and naked opportunists.

It is only societal leaders that can motivate people to work because they have the interest of the work, Nation and the people, but instrumental leaders cannot motivate, this being the case, we want to see the type of leaders we have in Delta State whether instrumentalists or societalists. From time immemorial, this had been the case with most of our leaders and all efforts to make them see reason and change for better proved abortive.

Although there are some factors that sustain instrumental leaders in Nigeria/African.
Some of these factors are:

(1) The guaranteed loyalty of the masses to leaders in Africa, and indeed in Nigeria the masses through socialization have come to internalize the norms of respect for authorities. They find it very different to criticize or challenge authority irrespective of what they do, although this is gradually changing.
(2) The title of office (chief, general, minister, commissioner etc).

This allows its holder to insist on being treated like one and if the behaviour or performances of the leader and expectation from the public of the present leader is the same as that of the past leader, people may not worry about any change. They see it as the usual thing. (What is called the usual behaviour).
(3) The deeds of Nigeria leaders-they are showered with lengthy eulogies composed during his life time by men who recite them in his honor at public gathering. As one man pointed out. Musicians have a tendency to sing the praises of leaders and men of wealth, not minding how corrupt they might be.

(4) Seeing the leader as the “first citizen” or the “great comrade” the omnipresence and omnipotence leader. These were demonstrated in Zik and Awo of Nigeria, Nkrumah of Ghana and Idiamin of Uganda.
(5) Weak or absence of institutional checks and balances. This has been a very big and serious problem in Nigeria. Both the military and the politicians are corrupt and treasury looter, because of the weak institutional checks and balances.
(6) Availability of resources to tap and steal. African leaders particularly Nigeria leaders take undue advantage of these short comings and circumvent the few institutional restraints that are in place. Because the checked on power is not in place or are not in working order, it gave rise to instrumental leaders. Because these leaders have tested power and discovered that National money can be stolen with impunity, they all want to rule, those that are already there do not want to go and that is why election to position of authority in Nigeria is described as a “do or die affair” on this basis we now want to find out, how applicable is this to Delta State and what could be done to solve the problem so that the state can move forward.

Productivity refers to the rate at which a worker, a country or a company produces goods and services, the amount produced, compared with how much time, work and money is needed to produce them. For productivity to increase, leaders must be able to motivate and coordinate their subordinates and other factors of production effectively. When the workers/subordinates are motivated, their morale will increase and they will be very happy, and when they are happy, productivity will increase.

Motivation on the other hand has to do with the morale of the staff to channel their behaviour in a given direction for increased productivity. Motivation is an inner state that energizes or moves and directs or channels behaviour towards goals. Motivation is a general term applying to the entire class of drives, desires, needs, wishes and similar forces. So managers must motivate their subordinates by satisfying their desires and inducing the subordinates to act in a desired manner. What motivates Mr. A may not motivate Mr. B, so managers must be able to discern and know how best to motivate their workers. Motivators are those things which induce an individual to perform. They may include

higher pay, a prestigious title, a name on the office door, the acclaim of colleagues, provision of official car with the name of the institution inscribed on it, use of company uniform, security, opportunity to join clubs or unions in the office and a host of other things that give people a reason to perform. To be sure, while motivators reflect wants, they are the perceived rewards or incentives that sharpen the drive to satisfy these wants. They are also the means by which conflicting needs may be reconciled or one need maybe accentuated so that it will be given priority over another.

A manager must be able to set up a very good incentive system to motivate his workers. For workers to be motivated, we need a good leader who can actually combine the incentives to meet the needs of both the employer and the employee so that the worker is happy and productivity increased, if workers are not happy, productivity will be affected, and a lot of loss or waste will occur. To avoid such lost and waste, there is the need to have a good leader that can combine the available resources to achieve set target and goals, and that is the purpose of this research.

A leader that is autocratic, selfish, or who does not care about the need of the workers would not be able to motivate anybody. Therefore there is the need for a societal or a servant leader to be able to influence and motivate the staff to work. When the morale of the workers are addressed by meeting their needs, they will be happy to work and even go extra mile to ensure that the objective of the organization is achieved because they know that if any thing bad happens to the company, they will be affected and so will do everything humanly possible to ensure that the organization succeed.
Before the creation of Delta State in 1991 (27th August, 91) the state was under Bendel State having it’s headquarter at Benin City, we had good leaders then. The bureaucrats were concerned with the growth of the state and the welfare of her workers. The workers then were made to realize that hard work pays notwithstanding the odds one would pass through. Leadership was then akin to priesthood. Leadership then means service, integrity, modeling, responsibility, maturity, partnership and above all, leadership comes first with a price.

Because we saw our leaders doing the right things then, the workers were motivated to work praying that one day they will

become leaders as well. This brought rapid growth and developments to the state. There were job opportunities for every body whether educated or not. While the educated ones were employed to work in government offices, others were engaged to work on the state farm settlements, rubber plantations and cocoa farms to mention a few. Standard of living was very high with very low rate of labour turnover and migration to other states of the federation. Only very few people were traveling abroad then because there was no need for it.

Delta state was then one of the largest producers of food crops like yam, Garri, plantain, potatoes and cash crops like rubber, palm oil, cocoa, timber and cotton to mention a few. In fact, there was dignity of labour, value for hard work and value for money.

Shortly after the creation of the state and with the discovery of petroleum oil, more money was now being given to the state from the Federation account. In 1998, all the non-Deltas were transferred back to their various states and those who refused transfer were compulsorily retired. Having succeeded in driving away the non Deltas, all the top and influential positions in the bureaucracy were shared by the Deltas. Appointment into and

promotions within the civil service proceeded on ethnic lines, qualifications or technical competence gave way to place of birth. Under the circumstance it was impossible to speak of meritocracy, rationality, efficiency, productivity and all the familiar concepts of Weberian formulation. This adversely affected productivity in the state. Similarly, the silent struggle for ascendancy between the administrative and political elite after driving away the non-Deltas succeeded only in merging politics with administration. Commissioners were appointed to head the ministries and as the political heads of the ministries, their influence perverted all the norms of recruitment, promotion, termination and discipline in the public service. The state civil service now began to experience leadership problems such as autocracy, inefficiency, corruption, lack of integrity, injustice, incompetence, embezzlement, mismanagement etc, like their counterparts in the public sectors which now informed this research to actually assess the effect of leadership on staff productivity in the state civil service.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM.

One of the most fundamental problems militating against the Delta state civil service is low productivity. The leaders are autocratic and they adopted autocratic approach to handle issues in the state civil service. This lowers the morale of the staff and they are no longer happy to work and because they are not happy to work, productivity decreases. Because morale of the workers is being dampened, the rate of migration out of the state has also increased and this has also affected productivity negatively. Similarly, the politicians that were appointed to head top and sensitive positions in the state civil service lacked the required qualities to motivate the workers and because of their autocratic style of leadership, inefficiency and truancy became the order of the day in the state ministries and this further reduced productivity. Low morale due to lack of motivation, corruption, mismanagement, injustice and autocratic style of leadership promoted high rate of labour turnover which further reduced productivity.
Consequently, the overall performance of the staff has reduced greatly because they are no longer happy to do their work. The state that used to be one of the largest producers of some food and cash crops now has to depend on importation of essential goods and services to meet the need of her people. Previous

researches on leadership focused mainly on the problems of leadership such as inefficiency, corruption, lack of integrity, incompetence, bad style, mismanagement, embezzlement, etc, but failed to address staff morale, relationship between leadership and productivity, and the effect of these leadership problems on staff performance and productivity particularly in the Delta state civil service. The following questions guide this study;