Social Science Grant Explores Associate Professors’ Job Satisfaction
Proposal Title: Profiles of Associate Professors: Clustering Associate Professors Based on Their Job Satisfaction
PI: K.D. Joshi, Professor of Information Systems, WSU
Funded: 2009
Project Overview
The prior analysis of the COACHE data focused on comparing faculty across ranks, i.e., comparing assistants, associates, and full professors which revealed that even after controlling for time since tenure, gender, and academic disciplines, associate professors are consistently less satisfied than the assistant and full professors. The objective of this proposed work is to further extend our understanding of the associate professors’ career development at WSU within the context of their job satisfaction levels. Therefore, in this study we seek to uncover the differences within associate professors based on their job satisfaction levels. More specifically, this work will look at the issue of the associate professors’ career development by profiling this group’s attitudes and perceptions about WSU’s promotion policies, nature of their work, WSU policies, and climate surrounding their work. The sample of 188 associate professors who responded to the COACHE survey was used to conduct this analysis [1].
Relevant Findings
- Trust Matters: The perceived reasonableness of the promotion criteria along with the perceived objectivity in the promotion decision processes collective predictive an associate professor’s job satisfaction levels. More specifically, the “more satisfied associate professors” on average are 3 times (with the 95% confidence limits of 2 to 6 times) more likely to find the promotion criteria to be more reasonable than the “less satisfied associate professors.” In other words, the odds of being more satisfied with your job triples with a unit increase in the perception of reasonableness with regards to the promotion criteria. In addition, the more satisfied associate professors are 2 times (with the 95% confidence limits of 1 to 2 times) more likely to perceive that the promotion decisions are based on objective performance-based criteria than the less satisfied associate professors. The perceptions corresponding to the promotion process, the clarity of the promotion criteria, and the message consistencies do not seem to predict the associates’ job satisfaction levels.
- Nature of Work Matters: The satisfaction levels corresponding to their teaching and research related activities are predictive of an associate professor’s job satisfaction levels. The more satisfied associate professors on average are 4 times (with the 95% confidence limits of 2 to 10 times) more likely to be satisfied with their teaching related activities than the less satisfied associate professors. The more satisfied associate professors on average are 3 times (with the 95% confidence limits of 2 to 5 times) more likely to be satisfied with their research related activities than the less satisfied associate professors. The satisfaction levels corresponding to the time spent on work, service related activities, support services, and available resources do not seem to predict the associates’ job satisfaction levels.
- Departmental Climate Matters: The overall culture, collegiality and climate within the department is highly predictive of an associate professor’s job satisfaction levels. The more satisfied associate professors on average are 8 times (with the 95% confidence limits 3 to 20 times) more likely to be satisfied with their departmental and WSU climate (only one item for the institutional climate and 13 items for the departmental climate).
- Effectiveness of WSU Policies Matters: The perceived effectiveness of WSU policies is highly predictive of an associate professor’s job satisfaction levels. The more satisfied associate professors are 9 times (with the 95% confidence limits of 3 to 31 times) more likely to find the WSU policies to be effective. Interestingly, the perceive importance of the WSU policies do not seem to predict the associates’ job satisfaction levels.
- Does Compensation and Work-Life Support Matter? The satisfaction with regards to the compensation and work-life support are not predictive of job satisfaction levels in the presence of climate and policy effectiveness, but are significant in the absence of these two factors. Need to analyze aspect more deeply.
- Demographics (such as the gender, race, unit, age) do not seem to significantly predict the associates’ job satisfaction levels.
Implications and Recommendations
These results provide some insight into the factors that are likely to increase an associate professor’s odds of being satisfied with his/her job. On average, the associates are less satisfied than the assistant and full professors. This work uncovers key factors that the administrators can focus on while attempting to increase the satisfaction levels of their least satisfied faculty employees.
[1] Because of the missing values the sample size varied for each of the predictors.
