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Too much Emphasis on Research? An Empirical Examination of the Relationship Between Research and Teaching in Multitasking Environments

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Abstract

While the public is concerned that emphasizing research performance among university faculty results in inadequate attention to undergraduate teaching, research on the relationship between research and teaching in higher education has failed to confirm or deny the validity of this concern. To empirically test this popular concern, we examined how the change in performance-based incentive systems to improve faculty publications influenced student evaluations of their teaching in a Korean university. The analysis of a panel dataset of individual faculty members shows that financial incentives on research rather than teaching could have redirected attention of some professors from teaching to research, thus reducing teaching quality, as proposed by advocates of multitasking theory. Therefore, these findings suggest that, when multiple tasks are significant to organizational values, the incentive structure must assure that each task or activity offers professors the same marginal return on their efforts.

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Notes

  1. Please see Kim and Bak (in press) for a comprehensive analysis of relationships among performance-based incentives, promotion requirements, and research performance. To examine dynamics of teaching effectiveness and research productivity in association with financial incentives, we used a subsample of the dataset used in Kim and Bak’s study.

  2. In our studied university, untenured professors include associate and assistant professors.

  3. A single-authored paper is counted as 1. If the professor is the first author or corresponding author and there is one co-author, the paper is counted as 0.66 (=2/3). Third, if the professor is neither the first author nor the corresponding author, and there is one co-author, the paper is counted as 0.33 (=1/3). This method has been used by many university ranking tables in Korea.

  4. The university we have studied also adopted financial incentives based on the impact factor of the journals where the article published. However, during our research period, the amount of incentive changed only once in 2009 and, due to the lack of variations, we do not include it in the analysis.

  5. The study included professors from three different areas: the science, engineering and medical fields. Field dummy variables were excluded from the analysis process because we ran the fixed effect models and the faculty did not change their fields during research period.

  6. We also examined the same models while controlling for the minimum number of publications for promotion, and the signs and significance levels of our variables of interest did not change. Additionally, the coefficient of the minimum number of publications for the promotion was not statistically significant.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a Grant from Kyung Hee University in 2011 (KHU-20110910).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, College of Politics and Economics, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea

    Hee-Je Bak

  2. Department of Public Administration, College of Politics and Economics, Kyung Hee University, 1 Hoegi-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 130-701, Korea

    Do Han Kim

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Correspondence to Do Han Kim.

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Bak, HJ., Kim, D.H. Too much Emphasis on Research? An Empirical Examination of the Relationship Between Research and Teaching in Multitasking Environments. Res High Educ 56, 843–860 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9372-0

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