Faculty Research Involvement: Organizational and Status Predictors At a Major University.

Abstract

Organizational theorists have become increasingly interested in the effect the quality of work environments have upon worker productivity. The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether the perceived quality of the research environment at a major research University affects faculty research involvement. The relationship between research involvement and a faculty member's professorial "status" (i.e., rank or discipline) was also studied. A conceptual model of research involvement that incorporates both organizational and status variables was operationalized for analysis. The study uses data collected by the Senate Assembly Research Policies Committee (RPC) at The University of Michigan. In October of 1980 the RPC mailed a five-page questionnaire to the entire faculty and research staff (n = 3,659) regarding the quality of the University research environment. A subgroup of the population, consisting of the professorial staff (n = 2,640), was chosen for analysis. The response rate (n = 1,672) was 63 percent for this subgroup. A one-way analysis of variance was performed upon two measures of research involvement using rank, discipline, and perceptions of organizational characteristics as independent predictors. The results can be summarized as follows: (1) Both status variables--rank and discipline--are clear predictors of the two measures of research involvement employed in this study. A positive, linear relationships exists between rank and both involvement measures--that is, the higher one's rank, the greater one's involvement. In the case of discipline, engineers are the most active researchers, closely followed by faculty in the Physical and Natural Sciences; faculty in the Humanities and Arts are significantly less involved in research than faculty in any other discipline. (2) While organizational theory suggests that negative perceptions of the quality of the research environment would result in diminished research participation, my findings reveal the opposite phenomenon: as faculty research involvement increases, so does their dissatisfaction with organizational aspects of the research environment.