Impact of total employee engagement on primary school pupils’ academic achievement in Tanzania

Abstract

Total employee engagement is a key principle of Total Quality Management (TQM) and is generally perceived to enhance pupils’ academic achievement in primary schools. Informed by systems theory, specifically TQM, this cross-sectional study examined the impact of total employee engagement on pupils’ academic achievement, while accounting for customer focus and urbanisation contexts, using data collected via a structured questionnaire administered to 68 of 872 primary school teachers. The respondents were selected using stratified sampling. Data analysis entailed SPSS-aided multiple linear regression. The study results indicate that each of the three variables—total employee engagement, customer focus and urbanisation level—had a significant positive contribution to pupils’ achievement. Specifically, increases in customer focus and urbanisation level play a significant role in enhancing pupil learning achievement, with β = .225 (p-value = .002) for customer focus and β = .216 (p-value = .000) for urbanisation level. Thus, the study recommends policy interventions to enhance further primary school total employee engagement practices, customer focus practices, and urbanisation levels to boost pupils’ academic achievement in the Tanzanian context.