This section will be divided into two sub-sections. The first sub-section will describe the non psychological characteristics and responses of the sample and in the process shade light on the state of our organisations. The second sub-section will examine the findings in terms of the hypotheses.
Table 1 below shows that just over 44% and 26 % had worked for four years or less and above eleven years respectively. About 13 % of the sample had worked for between eight to ten years.
Table 1: Tenure
Years in Organisation |
Count |
% |
< 4 5 - 7 8 -10 11 -13 14 and above |
480 173 141 123 161 |
44.5 16.0 13.1 11.4 14.9 |
Reflecting the professions in which our sample were involved, the majority were relatively well educated. Most had obtained post-secondary school training (56%), a negligible percentage (3 %) had primary education and at least 10 % had a first or a second degree. Six hundred and forty-nine (649) or 60.2 % of our sample were female probably reflecting the predominance of women in these two professions.
Of the sample who agreed to indicate their chronological age, over 50% were 35 years and below. Only 1% indicated that they had reached retiring age.
We calculated an index of kinship responsibility by adding up the number of relatives including spouses a respondent was directly responsible for. A full load of responsibility is indicated by 13 points and no responsibility at all by a zero (0). Table 2 below summarises the findings and shows that most of our respondents (45%) have between 8-13 people they look after, which is above half the load (mean = 6; median = 6). The mean load is three times as much as the mean load (approximately 2) carried by a comparable group in the United States of America (see Blegen et al, 1988). The total percentage of those with half the load and more is approximately 66.
Table 2: Kinship Responsibility
Load |
Count |
% |
0 - 1 2 - 3 4 - 5 6 - 7 8 - 13 non response |
67 142 247 214 405 3 |
6.2 13.2 23.0 19.9 44.9 .3 |
The heavy kinship responsibility was found to compare unfavourably with what our respondents earned. To have an idea of how our sample fared, we asked them to indicate their monthly take-home pay including allowance and their monthly expenditure. Table 3 summarises the findings.
Table 3: Salaried and Wage Income and Monthly Expenditure
('000* shillings)
Income |
% |
Expenditure |
% |
<25 25 - 50 50 - 100 |
74.2 23.2 2.6 |
< 25 25 - 35 50 - 100 |
0 0.4 78.9 |
* 1200 Shillings = US$1
These figures indicate a clear imbalance between what our respondents earn from their organisations and what they have to spend. The figures are however in agreement with the World Bank report. As is clear from the table the difference between the income and expenditure is significant (t = 23.62 ; df = 743; p.< 0.0001).
Most of the sample made up for the difference in activities that take them away from their paid work as is shown in Table 4 below.
Table 4: Income-generating Activities
Category of Activities |
% |
1. Advance, borrowing, begging from relatives/donations 2. Magendo,petty trade,tendering,briefcase business 3 Others:private practice, drug store,knitting, poultry,piggery,farming |
35.6 40.6 57.5 |
Asked when income-generating activities outside one's formal employment started,some respondents said that it was during Amin's time when it paid more to practice magendo than to do a paid job. Others said that most people started after Amin. All agreed that these intensified after Amin. (see Table 5 below).
Table 5: Period in which Activities Began
|
% |
Before or during Amin After Amin Intensified after Amin |
15 85 100 |
Our informants are in agreement with the findings of the Report of the Public Service Review and Reorganisation Commission which found that 86% of income supplementary activities among civil servants started in 1980s (The Republic of Uganda, 1989) and confirm an important consequence of SAPs in Uganda, namely the deterioration of service: as a result of the squeeze that accompanies the programmes.
In light of the finding that the largest percentage of the workforce were engaged in income- generating activities that took them out of their formal employment, we asked them what their organisations do about their behaviour (organisational misbehaviour). The following table summarises the answer to the question.
Table 6. Organisational Sanctions
Sanctions |
% |
Withhold allowance Warning Withhold leave Deny promotion Delay salary Not applicable |
5 3 4.3 1 0.7 3.1 |
The general conclusion we drew from responses to this question is that organisations exert very little control over the activities of their members. This is not surprising since organisations feel inadequate when it comes to remunerating its members and providing them with the resources for professional growth.
As Table 5 above implies, the current organisational problems are traceable to the breakdown of the civil order as well as the introduction of SAPs. One headmaster interviewed put the events affecting school performance in three clear phases:
(1) The boom time (1970-1980) which he said followed the expulsion of Asians and the turning of their businesses over to black Ugandans. Schools lost their teachers to the new opportunities created by Amin. (2) The period of instability (1981-1985) when people were living from day to day in real fear for their lives. Here teachers like any workers did as little as possible and moved to wherever was considered safe. (3) The period of inflation (1986 onwards) which effectively reduced the salary power of teachers. Stability is experienced but people cannot survive on one job. The most significant cause of the deterioration in education is the cost of living.
Another interviewee was equally certain that their problems can be accurately traced to the period of the SAPs. She said:
Compared to the 1970s, we now live the most difficult lives we have ever lived. Our teachers live in garages. They pay for this accommodation by offering free couching lessons to the children of landladies and landlords. This creates a relationship which children interpret as servant-master relationship which they also try to exploit at the cost of the teacher. Other teachers improve their status by engaging in other businesses such as retailing in stalls, retail stores and lockups. Those with more marketable teaching subjects take part-time jobs in the private sector. Those who cannot do so,teach in more than one school. In whichever activities they are engaged in, such teachers report to class ten minutes late and leave 10-15 minutes before the end of a lesson. The problems are most acute in those schools where for some reason the Parents Teachers Association are weak and unable to organise sufficient funds. This is true in many remote schools and in day schools in urban areas.
The commissioner for education was also clear on the plight of teacher particularly rural teachers. He said that the SAPs have hit the rural teacher hardest of all (compared to the urban teacher). We confirmed what he said, namely that many couldn't afford descent clothing. They come to school dressed in torn trousers and wearing sandals in a poor state of repair.
A direct reference to the influence of SAPs on organisational functioning was made by a number of interviewees. One said that the inflationary trend of SAPs has resulted in the deviation of funds from capital to recurrent budgets such as paying teachers and buying food. "As a result we are unable to expand". SAPs have also ensured that teachers resort to coaching in a dishonest way. In order to attract more funds, they have to attract more parents. They therefore give extra marks to children and to pupils they coach and less to those they do not coach. This is done to encourage parents to participate or to continue to participate in coaching.
At the level of the organisation, schools must also please parents in order to survive. If no proper teaching can take place, schools must resort to forms of examination malpractice so as to get an acceptable level of first grades. It is the numbers of first grades that make parents happy and encourages them to send more children to high-performance schools.
Parallel instances of organisational failure leading to employment related misbehaviour are to be found in the health sector as well. Because these have to do with life and death, they often make headline material unlike those in schools. There is the case of the intern in Jinja hospital who was alleged to have led to the death of a patient because the patients' relatives were unable to pay the young doctor a sum of money he had demanded. This kind of lack of professionalism and general indiscipline among health workers is recognised by all medical superintendents we interviewed. Pilferage was reported to be continuing, "cutting" ward rounds by doctors was mentioned as common, and the bedside manner of nurses was found to be unprofessional.
The last example (bedside manner) was shown to have far-reaching consequences. We found for instance that relatives of patients have responded by taking on the nursing services. This has often led to overcrowding, the size of which was never planned for. One superintendent reported that in her hospital, every patient had at least two full-time attendants so that in a hospital ward of 100 children she would find 300 people at one single moment. This number would stretch the capacity of the system to the limit with reference to water shortage, sewerage, physical living space and so on.
No direct connection between the SAPs and the problem of hospitals were made (unlike the case of the educators) by our informants. Several superintendents and other chief medical officers related indiscipline and lack of professionalism to the fact that the services have been overwhelmed and to the loss of prestige that the medical health professions have experienced. Indirectly though, they accepted the role of SAPs in the stress that health organisations are undergoing. They all agree that the loss of prestige was brought about by the erosion of their salaries as a central aspect of their income. One superintendent reported that health professionals, especially doctors, are used more like servants by those with money. Since the undermining of the salaried class has come in the wake of SAPs, it is plausible to argue that part of the loss of professionalism among health workers, as is with educationists, is related to adjustment programmes.
Examples of the consequences of SAPs in the health services are not confined to remuneration only. Two case studies described below indicate how the services have been overwhelmed as a result of the reallocation of resources from the non-tradeable sector. The deprivation has in some cases been so complete that the services are hardly in position to make proper use of donor provided help.
Case 1: District Nursing Officer
My nurses and myself no longer get free uniforms. Those that cannot afford them out of their own pockets use their own ordinary clothes. If you need something from the district medical office, you use your own money to collect it and this money is not refunded any more. If for example you have to travel to collect drugs, then you try to refund the transport money from the sale of drugs. And when you are transferred, you are given no facilities in terms of transport. Again you find your own money and try to recover it from the resources of your office. There are few or no promotions and opportunities for upgrading are minimal.
The data also show that we would not be exaggerating if we concluded that without altruism most government services would ground to a halt. The case study below gives an example of an altruistic medical officer.
Case 2: Recently Qualified Medical Doctor
On assumption of duty I found a huge unfurnished house which I set about furnishing with the bare essentials such as a mattress and two hurricane lamps. The money to purchase them was donated by my family. The hospital has a generator but the government provides no money for petrol to operate it. Therefore I get money from my family who live in Kampala. They also top my salary up. To treat patients without the assurance of power, I got hospital users to come with their own charcoal and charcoal burners. With these, they boil water to be used in treatment and they use the stoves to sterilise the syringes to be used. I make regular trips to the medical stores at Entebbe and I may have to wait for three days before I am attended to. I am jokingly referred to as the 'Man from Mubende'.
The basic hypothesis of this study is that workers in formal employment relationships respond in a rational way to the work experience and environment we have briefly described. To test this hypothesis we proposed the concept of the psychological contract and stated that the way the state of the contract is perceived is related to the way workers behave in their organisations. To examine the hypothesis we correlated our measure of the psychological contract with the measure of discretionary cooperation operationalised as conscientiousness and altruism. Table 7 below shows the results.
Table 7: Zero Order Correlation for Rated Discretionary Cooperation
(Conscientiousness & Altruism Coefficients)
Independent variables |
Consc n=389 |
Altruism n = 389 |
Intent n=570 |
Affect n=570 |
Jobsat n=570 |
Alpha |
Size |
-.01 |
.18* |
-.16* |
-.09 |
-.07 |
|
Tenure |
.04 |
.14* |
-.14* |
.11* |
.00 |
|
Education |
-.03 |
.05 |
.17* |
-.15* |
-.07 |
|
Kinship responsibility |
-.02 |
.05 |
.18* |
-.04 |
-.01 |
|
Psychological contract |
.10* |
.08 |
-.42* |
.43* |
.52* |
.8 |
Organisational trust |
.05 |
-.01 |
-.31* |
.29* |
.35* |
.5 |
Need satisfaction |
.08 |
.01 |
-.33* |
.46* |
.42* |
.8 |
Distributive justice |
.096** |
.17* |
-.18* |
.18* |
.39* |
.9 |
Affective commitment |
.07 |
.03 |
-.37* |
1 |
.39* |
.8 |
Job satisfaction |
.07 |
-.62 |
-.29* |
.39* |
1 |
.9 |
Alpha |
.89 |
.60 |
.75 |
.82 |
.85 |
|
* p<.001
** p<.05
The results provide support of the importance of the psychological contract in employment relationships. Under the column marked conscientiousness (consc) we can see the positive and significant correlation between the contract and discretionary cooperation. Conscientiousness refers to general compliance or the willingness to perform general cooperative acts, including regular unfailing attendance, that are difficult for management to demand. Distributive justice, on its own, is also positively related to conscientiousness. Its independent status is also revealed in the second column marked altruism. Altruism is an aspect of discretionary cooperation that specifically taps willingness to render help to colleagues or to clients waiting to be served. It is exemplified by a bank clerk who would temporarily abandon her/his post in order to attend to a waiting customer in the absence of a specific teller attendant.
Other relationships that are important to note in the above table are those between the psychological contract and intention to leave the organisation (intent) and between the contract, commitment and job satisfaction. The negative results between intention to leave the organisation and the psychological contract are to be interpreted positively meaning that those who enjoy a positive psychological contract with their employing organisation are also those unwilling to leave. The relationship between commitment, job satisfaction and the contract are in the positive and expected direction meaning that those who are committed or who pose little or no moral hazard are those who experience a positive contract. Job satisfaction is also a concomitant of a positive contract.
The same relationships can be indirectly examined by looking at the scores of the various groups that took part in the study. Table 8 below summarises our findings and takes location, i.e. whether the groups are rural or urban, as the independent variable. Significant differences are found on both aspects of discretionary cooperation. In both cases the difference is in favour of rural health workers who were rated as relatively conscientious and altruistic. There was no difference between rural and urban teachers as well as between them and urban health workers on conscientiousness. On altruism though, urban health workers were rated by their supervisors as the least helpful. With regard to intention to exit one's organisation, the difference was in favour of urban workers of both education and health services. There was a strongly expressed desire by the rural workers in both sectors to exit their organisations. No difference exists between all the four groups on the measure of the psychological contract. This is to be expected as the non-profit making nature of both services confines the employees to a monthly salary which we have seen, is significantly less than the expenditure of the employees.
Table 8: Brief Summary of ANOVA
Variables |
F Ratio |
Probability |
Conscientiousness |
2.5 |
>.05 |
Altruism |
9.3 |
>.001 |
Intention to exit |
21.6 |
>.001 |
Psychological contract |
.6 |
<.10 |
