Relationship Between Level of Educational Attainment and Employee Performance: Mediating Role of Individual Religious Affiliation

Purpose: This study empirically investigates the relation between education level and employees’ performance working in public sector universities from the viewpoint of Islamic religiosity when religious affiliations play mediating role. It has been experienced that more educated people are found to be more involved in performing tasks related to the religious affiliations. Due to the fact that people with higher education found less time to complete their religious obligations, they are more involved in alternative arrangements like charity and donations to fulfill the hunger of religious attainments. Therefore, in order to satisfy themselves religiously, they are more involved in religious affiliations. This high involvement in fulfilling religious arrangements impacts their individual job performance which is necessary to explore. Research Methodology: Data was gathered from the public sector university employees of Pakistan. Out of 900 distributed questionnaires, 520 were received with response rate of 73.65%. Regression analysis is performed in order to determine the association between level of education and individual performance. Further, in order to determine the mediating role of religious affiliations, the Barren and Kerry (1984) model is applied. Findings: Using questionnaire survey the results of the study showed that level of education significantly impacts the religious affiliations in positive manner and high religious affiliations increase the individual job performance. The results at this point indicated that an unobservable indicator, like propensity for logical rationale induces individuals for higher education and ultimately high religious affiliations. Recommendations: Based upon the results, it is recommended that religiosity and ethical values in management set up are need to be escorted by public reforms to let the identification of employees to their work values and their obligation to the performance of work-related tasks. Originality: This study would be a clear contribution in the field of human behavior towards making alternative arrangements in order to fulfill religious obligations and at the same time identifying the mediating role of religious attainments in determining their individual performance.

Elucidation of Molecular Genetic Basis of Schizophrenia and Primary Microcephaly in Pakistani Population

The high degree of consanguineous marriages, languages, and religion are important factors responsible for high frequency of diverse hereditary disorders in Pakistani population. High incidence of inherited disorders is an ideal substrate to initiate molecular studies in Pakistani population. In this thesis I have systematically identified, phenotyped and sampled complex disorder (Schizophrenia) and rare Mendelian disorder (Primary Microcephaly) in families of different ethnicities/regions in Pakistan. Schizophrenia is a chronic neuropsychiatric disease afflicting around 1.1% of the population worldwide. The symptoms appear in late adolescence or early adulthood, and mainly manifest as hallucination, delusions, cognitive deficit, abnormal moods and behavior. In this thesis 16 multiplex schizophrenia families were systematically identified, diagnosed and sampled from different ethnicities/regions of Pakistan, along with a second cohort of 508 unrelated Pakistani schizophrenia patients. Fifteen out of the sixteen families were excluded for the presence of pathogenic Copy Number Variations (CNVs) by genome wide array screening. While in one of the 16 families pathogenic rare novel duplication was detected on chromosome 5q14.1_q14.2 that truly segregated with the phenotype. Exome sequencing of schizophrenia families revealed three rare and eight common variants in two families. A set of top schizophrenia candidate genes (MIR137, CACNA1C, CSMD1, GRM3 and DRD2) was selected to evaluate their association with schizophrenia in Pakistani population. A case control association study revealed a significant difference in the genotype and allele frequencies of three SNPs between the patients and controls (p = 0.000). Autosomal Recessive Primary Microcephaly (MCPH) is a neurodevelopment defect, characterized by congenital reduction in Occipitofrontal Circumferance (OFC)/Head Circumference (HC) is at least 4 standard deviations (SD) below the ethnically matched, age and sex related mean. MCPH is associated with some degree of mental retardation which persists throughout their life without additional xx morphological or clinical symptoms. The prevalence of primary MCPH is 1 in 10,000 in Pakistani population. In this thesis six consanguineous MCPH families originating from different cities of Punjab were analyzed. Linkage analysis and exome sequencing revealed four novel and two known mutations in MCPH families. The findings in this study will help in understanding the disease mechanism and related pathways as well as annotating various entities of genome. This knowledge will help in efficient carrier screening, genetic counseling and prenatal diagnosis of affected families and ultimately to development of effective therapeutic approaches.