Abstract:
It has been realized that teachers who assume duty in schools either get motivated or
de-motivated with time. The study titled ‘A Perception Study of Motivation,
Interpersonal Relationships and Performance of Teachers in Pre-tertiary Schools in
Upper East Region of Ghana’ sought to understand the effect that a good interpersonal
relationship in schools has on teacher motivation and how to improve teacher
motivation by the deployment of a model of interpersonal relationships in pre-tertiary
schools to engender better teacher motivation for better teacher performance. A
number of research designs were used, involving both quantitative and qualitative
designs. A mixed method approach was employed to collect, process and analyse data.
The study is majorly an exploratory research. The major findings were that teachers in
the region were satisfied with their job (56.6%) but not motivated (83.5%). Poor
teacher motivation corresponded with poor student achievement in both national and
international standardized tests. The association between the degree of motivation and
the socio-economic factors was found to be a power relationship. Interpersonal
relationships provided the highest motivation to teachers at a mean responds rate of
76.2%. An interpersonal relationships model of teacher motivation was formulated
through Grounded Theory approach thus: TM = kR + μ(f€)W. TM is teacher
motivational level, R is the degree of interpersonal relationships in the school and f€ is
the combined effect of the socio-economic factors available to the teacher. ‘k’, μ and
‘W’ are sociometric parameters. Improving interpersonal relationships in pre-tertiary
schools could therefore bring about a higher degree of teacher motivation.
