Factors Associated with Job Satisfaction Amongst Australian University Academics and Future Workforce Implications
Australian academics appear to be fairly critical when it comes to their valuing of the attractiveness of the academic profession. On the set of indicators constructed for this volume, Australians, together with their British colleagues, score the lowest.
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Factors Associated with Job Satisfaction Amongst Australian University Academics and Future Workforce Implications Peter James Bentley, Hamish Coates, Ian R. Dobson, Leo Goedegebuure, and V. Lynn Meek
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Introduction
The goals of Australian higher education have undergone dramatic transformations in recent decades, from broadly defined social, cultural and political goals towards explicitly contributing to national productivity and economic growth (Lafferty and Fleming 2000). The late 1980s’ Dawkins reforms reoriented universities towards private funding, whilst the post-1996 Howard reforms further limited the role of public funding in universities. In some respects the results have been impressive. Higher education has expanded domestically with increased participation, and a by-product of these policy changes has been the growth in higher education as a major export industry. Education-related travel services (fees and living expenses of foreign students studying in Australia) are Australia’s largest service export worth A$18.5 billion in 2010, of which international higher-education students account for A$10.6 billion (Australian Government 2011). However, the dramatic changes in funding and governance have also raised concerns from within the academy. Studies of job satisfaction in Australian universities have routinely
P.J. Bentley • L. Goedegebuure • V.L. Meek L.H. Martin Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Management, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia H. Coates L.H. Martin Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Management, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), Melbourne, Australia I.R. Dobson(*) Higher Education Governance and Management Unit, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland School of Education and Arts, University of Ballarat, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P.J. Bentley et al. (eds.), Job Satisfaction around the Academic World, The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective 7, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5434-8_3, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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offered a somewhat depressing image of life in the academy, calling into question the sustainability of an industry reliant upon autonomously motivated knowledge workers. For universities to reverse the despondent outlook of their academic staff, one must pay attention to their primary sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the factors associated with job satisfaction amongst Australian university academics, with reference to Hagedorn’s (2000) conceptual framework. For only if we know what these primary sources are, appropriate policy responses at the national and institutional level can be initiated. Concerns about job satisfaction in academia are nothing new. In their analysis of the 1991/1992 Carnegie survey, Lacy and Sheehan (1997, p. 306) found less than half (49%) of Australian academics were satisfied with th
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