Personal Issues and Employee Performance. A study about the impulsive behavior and attitude of employees of public and private companies

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - Personnel and Organisation, , language: English, abstract: The purpose of this study is to ascertain that reprehensive behaviors at work in the public and private sectors in Cameroon result from personal issues and these issues can impede employee performance. In other words, the study is designed to investigate impulsive behavior and attitude of employees due to family/personal issues and to test the effects of these behaviors on performance. Online questionnaires were sent to 225 employees of public and private companies across the country. A total of 24 employees were sampled to be interviewed from both the public and private companies. The sample was given representation to both male and female using stratified random sampling. The collected data were analyzed using percentages, graphs and tables. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics with the application of both qualitative and quantitative measures. The findings indicated that personal issues account for the reprehensible and disreputable behavior of employees that are often neglected by the organization not having structures to handle such issues. Findings showed that employees in the Public sector of Cameroon behave more irrationally than those in the private sector because they are unable to manage their personal issues which greatly affects their performance although employees in the private sector had some personal issues that affect their performance. It was also found that employee performance is affected by personal issues. Finally, the findings revealed that most organizations in Cameroon do not have a structure to assist employees struggling with personal issues and those that had structures like counselling units put in place were ineffective and inefficient. The study suggested that counseling is a distinct tool to assist employees deal with problems and feelings that perturb their performance.