Vol. 3 - 2026
While the contribution of university lecturers' scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa has attracted the interest of researchers in higher education over the years, the institutional and managerial factors that impact on or reduce it have been less examined than those that explain individual level factors. When thinking about productivity, governance and administrative culture, as well as the allocation of decision-making power, tends to be on the sidelines of the agenda rather than at the center of the discussion. This study eschews these factors, placing them at the forefront. The setting of the study was public universities in Southwest Nigeria which included 6 Universities in Oyo, Ogun and Osun States, from which 412 Lecturers were selected using stratified random sampling technique. Three instruments were used to collect the data: The Distributed Leadership Inventory (Cronbach's α = .84), Institutional Support Scale (α = .81), and Research Productivity Scale (α = .79). The study used descriptive survey and the main analytical techniques were Pearson Product Moment Correlation and Multiple Linear Regressions. Results show that distributed leadership is positively related with research productivity on a statistically significant level (r = .62, p< .05). The overall model accounted for 48.3% of the research productivity variance (R² = .483, F(4, 407) = 47.21, p<.05) with institutional support (mentors, research grants, physical facilities, and digital facilities) explaining about half the variance. Mentorship proved to be the most significant predictor (β = .34). It is especially important in contexts where formal research structures are seriously deficient and grants are not reliable, or where junior researchers work on research without formal support. The theoretical framework is based on the distributed leadership model of Spillane (2006) and the integrative approach to faculty scholarship of Boyer (1990). The findings are interpreted in the light of comparative research on governance in higher education in under-resourced contexts. The study focuses on implications for university administrators and education policy makers.
Distributed Leadership, Higher Education Governance, Institutional Support System, Lecturer Productivity
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