Do Evaluative Pressures and Group Identification Cultivate Competitive Orientations and Cynical Attitudes Among Academic
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Do Evaluative Pressures and Group Identification Cultivate Competitive Orientations and Cynical Attitudes Among Academics? Tobias Johansson1,2 Received: 1 April 2020 / Accepted: 31 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article theorizes and analyzes how two aspects of the increasing accountingization of academia in the form of evaluative pressures and group identification, independently and interactively, work to cultivate academics’ self-interest for their social interactions with the scientific community, forming them to adopt more competitive orientations and cynical attitudes. Using data of a large number of faculty members from the 17 universities in Sweden, it is shown that evaluative pressures and group identification perceived by academics jointly reinforce each other (interact) in affecting their competitive orientation, and that group identification strengthens (moderates) the positive relation between evaluative pressures and academics’ rivalry notions and cynical attitudes. It is shown, contributing further to research on performance evaluation and the cultivation of self-interest and an egoistic ethical climate in academia, that it is evaluative pressures from peers rather than from performance measurements that are the major driver of an individual’s competitive (less cooperative) orientation and cynical attitudes. It is also concluded that while evaluative pressures are related to an increase in academics’ competitive orientations, which may be viewed as an intended effect from control designers in universities, such an orientation is inversely related to cooperativeness and openness toward others and goes hand in hand with an increase in having cynical attitudes about peers and the work environment. Control designers in universities may thus not be able to have the one without the other, something that raises ethical concerns for academic leaders to reflect upon when aiming at cultivating self-interest orientations of academics. Keywords Performance evaluation · Peer pressure · Competition · Cynicism · Group identification · University · Survey
Introduction Universities have become strongly influenced by managerialism, and academics are increasingly performance-evaluated and pressured to publish, perform more broadly, and compete (e.g., Parker 2011, 2013; Ter Bogt and Scapens 2012; Gendron 2015; Su and Baird 2017). Extensive case evidence exists of academics’ altered orientations in the form of becoming more competitive and performance-oriented (e.g., Gendron 2008; Ter Bogt and Scapens 2012; Malsch and Tessier 2015; see also Kallio et al. 2016 for large N survey-based empirics on the broader topic), and of their adoption of a pay-off (self-interest) mentality (Gendron * Tobias Johansson [email protected] 1
Örebro University, 70281 Örebro, Sweden
Mälardalen University, 72123 Västerås, Sweden
2
2008, 2015) as a consequence of evaluative practices and pressures in universities. Despite these research efforts and results, deepening our knowledge and empirica
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