To meet this need, the working group
decided to conduct an exit survey of faculty who have left the university for
other academic institutions and to create a resource book to help department
leaders facilitate research productivity. Today I am only talking about the
resource book. At our next meeting there will be presentation on the exit
survey.
The book was designed to provide department leaders with two
intimately intertwined tool sets for facilitating research:
1. An
overarching, literature-based framework for thinking about and attending to
faculty research productivity.
2. A set of diverse, concretized
strategies – best practices, if you will – for facilitating research
excellence in their own institutions.
Why a
literature-based framework? Given their limited (and shrinking)
resources, department leaders simply cannot afford to make uninformed decisions
about which research-facilitating strategies they should pursue. Fortunately,
there is over 40 years of literature defining the many correlates/predictors of
research productivity that we have summarized on this figure. Numerous
studies outline the characteristics of successful individual researchers. They
include such factors as: motivation, socialization, competence in their content
area, well-developed research skills, committed involvement in both
institutional and discipline-specific activities (orientation), scholarly work
habits, and a balance between institutional commitment and individualism
(autonomy).
But while these individual characteristics are essential,
they are not sufficient in and of themselves. Of all the factors that affect an
academic’s productivity, none are as powerful as the environmental
features of the work place. Studies reveal that productive academic
organizations have a consistent set of features. These include: targeted
recruitment and selection of driven faculty researchers; clear goals that serve
a coordinating function; a research emphasis; a strong academic culture and a
positive group climate; mentoring for junior faculty; frequent communication
between faculty and their professional networks; the presence (and perception)
of sufficient and accessible resources; substantial, uninterrupted time for
research; a critical mass of faculty who have been together for a while and who
bring different perspectives to the mix (diversity); adequate and fair salaries
and other rewards; proactive brokering of opportunities for all faculty; and a
decentralized organization, led by seasoned, participative, academic leadership.
Effective leadership is a particularly important characteristic of
research productive organizations. It is the leader who influences the presence
or absence of all other institutional characteristics. The overarching profile
of the effective leader is one who facilitates group productivity through the
pairing of common goals and some structure, with highly participative
governance.
While this body of literature is not new to scholars of
research productivity, it is typically not familiar to the busy department
head. So,
· The first chapter in the resource book introduces
readers to a comprehensive, literature-based model of “the research
productive organization.”
· The subsequent 13 chapters are
organized, such that each addresses a single feature on the model of the
research productive organization. This allows readers to dig deeper into one
characteristic, be that faculty recruitment, mentoring, reward systems, or
issues of group culture and climate. Each chapter begins with a brief
introduction summarizing prior literature on the characteristic, along with a
reference list.
Why a qualitative set of best practices?
Naming a characteristic is one thing; putting it into practice is quite another.
For example, we know from prior literature that having clear organizational
goals which guide members’ work is an important environmental
characteristic for facilitating research. But how, in practical terms, are an
academic department’s goals and research priorities established? How are
they communicated and reinforced? Similarly, we also know that researchers need
sufficient work time. But what specific strategies do highly research
productive departments actually apply to maximize the time their faculty are
engaged in research-related activities?
We sought answers to these
pragmatic questions by interviewing the leaders (heads, chairs, deans) of 37
highly productive research departments or colleges at the University of
Minnesota. These leaders were identified by asking each college dean to
identify up to three highly research productive departments in his or her
college. We then invited the chairs/heads of these identified departments to
participate in our interview study. Our final cohort consisted of 37
departments, with at least one department from each of our 23 colleges, except
Crookston. Where colleges did not have departments, a similar unit was
identified, or the whole college served as the unit of analysis. The Crookston
campus was not included in this study because it has relatively recently changed
to a four year, baccalaureate degree granting college and is building its
research capacity. The second part of each chapter in the book provides the
concrete strategies offered up by these department heads. Here is a list of the
department heads interviewed. This table provides demographic information on
these departments.
Let me say just a bit more about the interviews. Each
Department Head was interviewed by a member of the working group using a
standard protocol based on the literature review. A research assistant also
attended every interview. The interview began with the open ended question:
“In your assessment of your department, what are the key factors that
contribute to the research productivity of your faculty?” The inclusion
and ordering of the remaining protocol questions was determined by (1) the
answer to this question and (2) the individual’s responses to the survey,
indicating on which characteristics they had strategies to share.
Each
interview was audio recorded and transcribed. Transcriptions were sent to the
working group interviewer for corrections and to the Department Head interviewed
for corrections or changes. Each Department Head was advised that they would
not be quoted, nor would identifiable information be used, without his or her
permission.
The interview data resulted in over 1,000 pages of double-spaced
text. Within each transcript, responses were coded and assigned to a theme.
NVivo Qualitative Research Software was used to sort the coded information
across transcripts into the study themes. This qualitative data set of practical
“lessons learned” constitutes the bulk of the book’s
narrative.
Not surprisingly, since the interview was organized around
the characteristics previously identified as being associated with high research
productivity, most of the text clustered into these areas. However, a few new
characteristics were revealed as well. These were: collaboration and teaching.
The emergence of these new characteristics is interesting, because these have
not previously been described as associated with research productivity in the
literature.
Recall, these are the areas in which we coded all the
information revealed in our interviews. This figure provides the macroscopic
view of the broad characteristics of a research productive organization. What
the interviews provided, however, was the microscopic view. In a few minutes,
I will next zoom in on a characteristics to illustrate examples of the specific
department practices we found that are included in the resource
book.
First let me say again that we we asked participants to share their
best practices related to all the individual, institutional, and leadership
features predictive of research productivity, summarized in the model. But,
the resultant resource book focuses most heavily on the environmental features.
This is because:
1. First, as noted above in the literature review,
institutional characteristics are the ones that most powerfully affect research
productivity.
2. Second, institutional characteristics are the ones an
institution can most readily influence.
3. Third, in a faculty exit
survey study conducted by the working group that also developed this book,
departmental features were found to be the greatest source of dissatisfaction
for faculty who have left the University of Minnesota.
4. Finally,
since most of the current faculty at the University of Minnesota are tenured,
they likely already have the individual characteristics of a productive
researcher. (Having a large proportion of tenured faculty is consistent with the
majority of faculty in the United States being over 55 years of
age.)5
Although the resource book focuses primarily on the
environmental characteristics of research productive departments, it does not
neglect the leadership and individual characteristics that also contribute to an
organization’s success. A consistent theme throughout the resource book
is the essential role department leaders play in building and sustaining a
research productive environment (e.g., its goals which emphasize research,
reward systems, opportunities for faculty’s career growth). Leadership
and governance are also addressed separately (and quite extensively) in the
final chapter of this book.
The individual characteristics predictive
of research productivity are also addressed in other chapters, most
substantially in Chapter 2 (Faculty Recruitment and Selection). Not
surprisingly, the interviewed department chairs/ heads were consistent in
reporting their desire to hire faculty candidates who already possess many
– if not all – of the individual features previously identified in
the literature as predictive of success.
Intended
Audiences
As mentioned earlier, we prepared this book primarily for
deans, department heads or chairs, and others responsible for maintaining or
increasing faculty research productivity in academic departments. Indeed, the
many diverse voices readers will hear in the book are from this peer group. We
expect, however, that the information will be of use to other audiences as well.
These might include:
· current faculty looking for ways to
increase their own research productivity;
· future faculty
searching for the academic home that will, by virtue of having certain desirable
environmental features, best facilitate their research
careers;
· scholars investigating ways to develop and sustain
research-conducive work environments;
· institutional leaders
– whether administrators or faculty – wishing to improve their
organization’s overall vitality (not just research
vitality).
Product
So far I have talked about why and how
we developed a resource book in response to our charge to facilitate research
productivity. Let me close by describing the content of the resource book and
giving you a glimpse into the rich pool or practices each chapter
contains.
The resource book is organized into chapters which mirror the
characteristics found to be associated with research productivity. Each chapter
is divided into three major sections:
1. What Does the Literature
Say? This section serves the important purpose of placing our results from
this one university into the broader context of what is already known from
previous literature about research-facilitating practices across many
institutions.
2. Department Practices. This section provides a
detailed narrative of our qualitative findings. The text is organized
thematically under topic questions, the answers to which include numerous
illustrative responses from the interviewed department heads – wonderfully
concrete examples of how these departments manifest all the characteristics of a
research-productive organization.
3. Overview. This section is a
bulleted abstract summarizing the core research-facilitating practices which
emerged from our qualitative research.
Here is the table of
contents.