The study examined the relationship between motivation factors and academic staff attitude to work in the public universities in Edo and Delta States, of Nigeria, for the purpose of determining whether motivation factors such as university autonomy and academic freedom, have influence on the attitude to work by academic staff. To guide this study four (4) research questions were asked out of which three (3) hypotheses were formulated to cover the dependent and independent variables. The study adopted the correlational survey design. The population consisted of all the academic staff in the four public universities in Edo and Delta States, which amounted to 2793. An approximated sample of 700 which represented 25% of the population were administered copies of the questionnaires but only 685 were retrieved out of which 680 were found usable. The content validity was applied to validate the instrument and the reliability of the instrument was found to be 0.77. The statistical methods used to analyze the data were the mean (X) for the one research question one and Pearson Product Moment correlation coefficient (r) for the three hypotheses, which were tested at 0.05 level of significance, after analysis, some of the findings amongst others were that: (1) Attitude to work of academic staff in Edo and Delta States public universities was negative. (2) Twin factors were found to have significant relationship with academic staff attitude to work in the Edo and Delta States public universities in Nigeria. Based on these findings, recommendations were proffered.