RELATIONSHIP MARKETING AND MARKET PENETRATION OF INSURANCE IN LAGOS STATE, NIGERIA

The relevance and contribution of insurance in nation building cannot be overemphasized. The insurance industry remains a major constituent and force in the global economy by virtue of the volume of resources it controls as premiums are collected and consequently its investment scale. Notwithstanding, customer patronage of insurance in Africa (except South Africa) is abysmally poor. Similarly, insurance market penetration in Nigeria is dismally low in comparison with other nations in Africa and beyond. While insurance penetration remains low at 0.4%, only 1.7 % of over 190 million people have insurance in place. This has been attributed largely to consumer apathy and subsequent low market penetration of insurance services. In order to help in identifying the areas that call for improvement, this study evaluated customer relationship marketing dimensions and market penetration of insurance in Lagos State, Nigeria. The study adopted a survey research design. The population of the study consisted of 375,000 estimated consumers of insurance services in Lagos State, Nigeria. A sample size of 1,650 consumers was drawn from selected Local Government Areas of Lagos State through the non-probability sampling technique. A questionnaire titled relationship marketing and market penetration of insurance was adapted and validated. The Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient for the constructs ranged between 0.76 and 0.90. A total of 1,650 copies of the questionnaire were administered, with a response rate of 80%. The data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential (multiple linear regression analysis) statistics. The findings revealed that relationship marketing has significant influence on market penetration of insurance (Adj. R2 = 0.124; F (5, 1306) = 38.222, p<0.05). Significant positive relationships were also found between some of the relationship marketing constructs and market penetration of insurance. The study concluded that relationship marketing dimensions of customer awareness, customer trust, customer service quality, product innovation and customization, and customer satisfaction are significant predictors of market penetration of insurance in Lagos State, Nigeria. Thus, to influence the market penetration of insurance, the adoption of relationship marketing is highly recommended.  Article visualizations

Perceived Causes and Control of Students’ Crises in Higher Institutions in Lagos State, Nigeria.

The study investigated perceived causes and control of students’ crises in higher institutions in Lagos State, Nigeria. The population comprised all students, staff, students’ union executive members and heads of the six sampled higher institutions. Four structured questionnaires were used to collect data from 954 samples used for the study. A test-retest method with a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.84 was used to determine the reliability of the instruments. Data collected were analyzed using percentages, frequency counts, correlations analysis and t-test through the SPSS package. The findings revealed the following: state- owned higher institutions were more prone to students’ crises than federal institutions; increase in tuition fees and inadequate attention to students’ welfare were major causes  of student crises whiles stable and moderate tuition fees was perceived as a good control measure to curb students’ crises. It was recommended that more funds be allocated to higher institutions and students should be involved in decision-making particularly on issues affecting their welfare. Keywords: Causes, control, students, crisis, higher institutions

Organizational Silence Behaviors Role on Employee Effectiveness

The debate on the role organisational silence behaviours play in employee effectiveness have remained unabated. More so, the education sector in Nigeria is facing challenges due to inadequate experienced talents to handle certain professional issues without much supervision. Therefore the paper examined the effect of organizational silence behaviours on employee effectiveness in selected private universities in Ogun State, Nigeria. In light of this five private universities were selected using multi-stage sampling technique and six hundred and ninety-six copies of a validated questionnaire was distributed while six hundred and twenty-nine retrieved after establishing reliability. The results from the multiple regression analysis conducted revealed that oorganizational silence behaviors have combined positive significant effect on employee effectiveness (adjusted R2 = 0.463, F(5,620)  = 108.844, p<0.05). However, from the individual predictors, top management characteristics, communication opportunity, supervisors’ characteristics and official authority had positive and significant effect on employee effectiveness. The paper recommends that management and supervisors should communicate more with their subordinates regularly, get feedback and suggestions to improve employee’s effectiveness on the job. Keywords: organizational silence behaviors role on employee effectiveness DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-9-09 Publication date:March 31st 202

Leadership Styles and Organisational Performance in Nigeria: Qualitative Perspective

Organizations in different sectors of the Nigerian economy continue to record high cases of misappropriation, embezzlement, immoral and unethical practices, gratifications, high labour turnover, inability to meet basic required obligations, and employees’ dissatisfaction, which have further resulted in poor performance. The theoretical paper dwelled on the concepts of leadership styles as opined by several scholars in the literature and used these as springboards to arrive at elaborate ones that encapsulated all and introduced a range of common and contemporary models and approaches, including an addition of a cutting-edge competitive list to help managers discover, devise and adjust their individual management practice and style for navigation towards a sustainable organizational performance

Assessment of critical success factors of business process re-engineering in the Nigerian oil and gas industry

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is defined as the critical analysis and radical redesign of existing business processes to achieve breakthrough improvements in performance measures like cost, quality, speed, profitability and services. The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical success factors of BPR implementation, to evaluate their effects on the primary measures as expressed by the operational performance and the secondary measures as expressed by the organizational performance, and to find out the effect of the operational performance on the organizational performance of Nigerian oil and gas companies. To achieve these objectives, an empirical study was conducted via the administration of 650 self-administered copies of questionnaire to a randomly selected senior and management staff of eight (8) re-engineered Oil and Gas Companies in Nigeria. Using the framework from Khong & Richardson (2003), factors manifesting operational performance and organizational performance were regressed on the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) manifesting successful BPR. Findings based on the survey revealed that successful BPR can positively affect both operational and organizational performance measures in the Nigerian oil and gas companies

Business Strategies and Competitive Advantage: Evidence from Flour Mill Companies in Lagos State, Nigeria

The authors argued from business strategies perspective to understand competitive advantage among homogenous producers. The population consisted of top and functional managers of flour mill companies in Lagos State, Nigeria. Cross sectional survey research design was adopted and primary data were collated and used. The research instrument was an adapted questionnaire. Its validity and reliability were statistically determined. Six hundred and twenty copies of the questionnaire were administered and 605 retrieved. Econometric equation was formulated and multiple regression analysis was employed for data analysis. Business strategies were found to have significantly affected competitive advantage. The study recommended product differentiation and portfolio diversification in order to achieve competitive advantage

Does high relatedness promote cheater-free multicellularity in synthetic lifecycles?

The evolution of multicellularity is one of the key transitions in evolution and requires extreme levels of cooperation between cells. However, even when cells are genetically identical, noncooperative cheating mutants can arise that cause a breakdown in cooperation. How then, do multicellular organisms maintain cooperation between cells? A number of mechanisms that increase relatedness amongst cooperative cells have been implicated in the maintenance of cooperative multicellularity including single-cell bottlenecks and kin recognition. In this study, we explore how relatively simple biological processes such as growth and dispersal can act to increase relatedness and promote multicellular cooperation. Using experimental populations of pseudo-organisms, we found that manipulating growth and dispersal of clones of a social amoeba to create high levels of relatedness was sufficient to prevent the spread of cheating mutants. By contrast, cheaters were able to spread under low-relatedness conditions. Most surprisingly, we saw the largest increase in cheating mutants under an experimental treatment that should create intermediate levels of relatedness. This is because one of the factors raising relatedness, structured growth, also causes high vulnerability to growth rate cheaters

Knowledge management and performance of organizations : a case study of selected food and beverage firms

Purpose: The objective of this paper is to ascertain the effect of knowledge management on the performance of organizations in Nigerian food and beverage manufacturing sector. Design/Approach/Methodology: To achieve the stated objective, the study used survey research design, with 320 samples from a population of 1587 employees of selected food and beverage firms in Nigeria. A validated questionnaire was used to collect data and structural equation modelling was used to analyze the data. Findings: Results showed that knowledge creation had a significant negative effect on innovation and knowledge sharing had a significant positive effect on innovation. The findings also revealed that knowledge creation has a significant positive effect on job satisfaction while knowledge sharing had an insignificant negative effect on job satisfaction. Practical Implication: The results can be used in efforts to improve the performance of the manufacturing sector in Nigeria and other developing countries by adopting knowledge management initiatives to enhance performance levels. Originality/Value: This study is an original study and it adds to scholarly debate on effect of knowledge management and the performance of manufacturing firms by giving evidence from a developing country. Manufacturing firms can adopt innovation as a channel for knowledge management to boost the performance of their businesses.peer-reviewe

Marketing activities and national development: is there a link?

The main objective of this study is to establish the link that exists between marketing and national development without losing sight of the intervening variables that might exist between them. The study suggested comparative advantage (CAD), resource-use efficiency (RUET), wealth creation (WECRE) as the possible variables and measure items were developed for them which were subjected to common and confirmatory factor analysis through which second –order factors representing CAD, RUET, and WECRE emerged. The Gaski and Etzel‟s(1980) index of consumer sentiments towards marketing was modified and used to measure marketing activities (MAC) and Diener et al. (1985)‟s satisfaction with life scale (SWLS) was used as measures of quality of life (QOL) for national development. All variables nomological relationship with subjective quality of life (QOL) was established.Keywords: Marketing activities; resource-use efficiency; wealth creation, quality of lif

Data from: Does high relatedness promote cheater-free multicellularity in synthetic lifecycles?

The evolution of multicellularity is one of the key transitions in evolution and requires extreme levels of cooperation between cells. However, even when cells are genetically identical, non-cooperative cheating mutants can arise that cause a breakdown in cooperation. How then, do multicellular organisms maintain cooperation between cells? A number of mechanisms that increase relatedness amongst cooperative cells have been implicated in the maintenance of cooperative multicellularity including single cell bottlenecks and kin recognition. In this study we explore how relatively simple biological processes such as growth and dispersal can act to increase relatedness and promote multicellular cooperation. Using experimental populations of pseudo-organisms, we found that manipulating growth and dispersal of clones of a social amoeba to create high levels of relatedness was sufficient to prevent the spread of cheating mutants. By contrast cheaters were able to spread under low relatedness conditions. Most surprisingly, we saw the largest increase in cheating mutants under an experimental treatment that should create intermediate levels of relatedness. This is because one of the factors raising relatedness, structured growth, also causes high vulnerability to growth rate cheaters