COADJUVANT STAFF RETENTION STRATEGIES IN SELECTED PUBLIC AND PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES IN ZIMBABWE: RETAINED LECTURER’S PERSPECTIVE

This study presented the selected Zimbabwe’s public and private universities’ Retained Lecturers’ perspective of the coadjuvant staff retention strategies (seventh excerpt from the researcher’s thesis). Purposeful and criterion sampling were used to select research cases and participants respectively. Data were generated from open-ended interviews and documentary analysis methods. The studied universities offered tuition waiver among other coadjuvant staff retention strategies, although existing literature is rather silent on this practice. It also established that public universities seemed to offer more financial support and encouragement to their lecturers than what private universities did. The study concluded that all the studied universities were undermining the professional growth and exposure by denying them opportunities for going on contact and sabbatical leave. It also concluded that public universities appeared to offer more promotional, academic and career growth opportunities to their lecturers than was the case with private universities. The study recommended that public and private universities need to realise that provision of contact, study and sabbatical leave to lecturers is a contractual obligation that universities can illegally deny lecturers. A second recommendation was that large-scale research in the field of coadjuvant staff retention strategies should be conducted across universities and other educational institutions for comparability’s sake.