Crispen Chipunza

In South Africa, the problem of service delivery cuts across all municipalities as manifested by citizen protests across the country on almost daily basis. To mitigate the costs associated with the protests, the South African government has placed emphasis on the role played by human resources management through instituting legislative frameworks, such as the the White Paper on Human Resource Management in the Public Service (1997). Despite this effort, the human resource management practices of municipalities continue to be criticized, by both municipal internal staff and citizenry. Service delivery in the South African context is regarded as one of the cornerstone indicators of how the government affords its citizens access to quality life as enshrined in its constitution. This paper is one of the studies based on the South African context attempting to explain the problem of service delivery by looking at perceived fairness in human resource management (HRM) practices by employees of municipalities and how such perceptions affect their motivation to work. Using the tenets of the organizational justice theory, the authors hypothesize that perceived HRM practices of municipalities can be predictors of employee motivation. Quantitative data collected from employees of nine randomly selected municipalities in the Free State Province are used to create indices for the different HRM practices as well as employee motivation. Significant correlation tests are performed. Results show a positive correlation between perceived fairness in the HRM practices of municipalities and employees’ motivation at .05 and .01 levels of significance. This means that fair HRM practices of municipalities promote employee motivation

The South African higher education sector introduced structural changes, which resulted in the creation of universities of technology, (hereafter referred to as UoTs). There, however, has the not been any known studies that investigated organizational culture and job satisfaction among academic professionals at these new types of institutions in the country. This study’s main objective was to determine perceptions of organizational culture and their impact on job satisfaction among academic professionals at a University of Technology in the Free State Province, South Africa. The study’s respondents had positive perceptions of the organizational culture with academic professionals showing satisfaction with co-worker relations, supervision support and the work itself, as well as moderate satisfaction with the available advancement opportunities. Academic professionals were, however, dissatisfied with the salaries they were receiving. A significant correlation between overall organizational culture and job satisfaction was found.