Behavioural Impediments in Realising Decent Academic Citizenship: Evidence from Nigeria’s Higher Education Sector

University roles include knowledge production, dissemination, and use. This improves essential teaching, research, and community services that measure national and international status. Citizenship behaviour in most organisations falls into three categories: member welfare, poor working conditions, and arbitrary administrative procedures. This chapter examines Nigeria’s higher education sector’s behavioural impediments to academic citizenship. It is believed that academics’ employment mobility makes it hard to find them even when on campus; classroom lectures, library reading rooms, and lab activities are possible. In fact, some academics travel widely for conferences, lectures, and visiting appointments at other institutions. This has sometimes been utilised for personal purposes by most academics. This chapter uses Organ’s organisational citizenship behavior (OCB)-Individual and OCB-Organisation perspectives to conceptualise academic citizenship behaviour (ACB). Five OCB categories related to university academic effectiveness are experimentally explained by comparing the influence of good academic citizenship on task performance. Three theories – planned behaviour, equity, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – underpin the chapter. Through conceptual analysis, academic citizenship is shown to be crucial to a university’s functioning as a unified organisation rather than a bunch of individuals focused on personal success. However, ACB is essential to academic life and the institution’s infrastructure. Tertiary institutions may improve satisfaction and productivity using incentive-based strategies. Adequate financing will encourage and predict good academic citizenship.