Role conflict, commitment, and coping, and scholarly productivity and satisfaction of social work academics.

Abstract

Review of literature found that social work academics were committed to the faculty roles of teaching and service. However, today's criteria for tenure, promotion, and other rewards in social work education emphasize scholarly productivity, especially publications. Given these conflicting emphases, this research tested eight hypotheses on the relationships between and among the predictor variables of (1) role conflict, (2) commitment to or identity with faculty roles, (3) appraisals of role conflicts, (4) coping strategies, and the criterion variables of scholarly productivity and satisfaction with social work program, institution, and career. The Role Episode provided the theoretical model to identify factors for study. Questionnaires were sent to 1,349 faculty members in 88 schools of social work; 506 (37.5 percent) responded. Proportionately more respondents were tenured, had higher rank, higher median salaries, and a higher percentage of doctorates than the population. Measures of predictor variables were: (1) five facets of role conflict, namely, intra-sender, inter-sender, inter-role, person-role conflicts, and role overload; (2) commitment to and identity with teaching, scholarship, and service; (3) appraisals of control, threat/harm, and challenge, (4) problem- and emotion-focused coping. Criterion variables included fourteen measures of scholarly productivity and three measures of satisfaction with career and work. Variables were reduced by factor analysis. Multiple correlations and regressions were used to identify the predictors of the criterion variables and the amount of variance explained by them. The major findings were: (1) commitment to a scholarly role identity strongly predicted scholarly productivity; (2) perceived control of workload strongly predicted overall satisfaction and satisfaction with institution, social work program, and the respondents career, thus far; (3) effects of role conflict were significant for satisfaction but not for scholarly productivity; (4) coping factors explained small amounts of the variance in scholarly productivity and satisfaction. Conclusions. Commitment to a scholarly identity may be associated with factors related to motivation for scholarship, such as self-efficacy. Faculty satisfaction may result from perceived autonomy and self-efficacy. Implications are discussed for enhancing commitment to scholarship. Research on motivation for scholarship and workload control is suggested.