Abstract
Researchers in academia typically perform different tasks: research, teaching and services to the scientific community. We analyze the opportunity costs in terms of a potentially reduced publication productivity associated with becoming a dean in the German institutional setting where deans are non-professional expert-leaders who temporarily take the dean position. Theoretically, we distinguish between two different effects that relate deanship and publication productivity: a resource effect where publication productivity during and—as a result of potentially having developed a taste for service—also post deanship decrease as a result of a reduction of the available time for research and a self-selection effect where pre-deanship publication productivity is lower than that of peers who are not about to become dean. Based on a dataset of 1110 business and economics researchers from German-speaking universities, we find evidence for a resource effect with leadership in academia reducing research productivity during and also post deanship. We find no evidence of a negative self-selection effect in the sense of less successful researchers being more likely to take the position of a dean. Reduced research productivity during and post deanship as compared to those researchers that never became dean is driven by those researchers who become dean in later periods of their career, i. e., presumably by those who deliberately shift their focus away from research and towards a stronger engagement in the scientific community in their late career years. Early career deans, on the contrary, seem to see their deanship more as a transitory role and are able to compensate the reduced resources during deanship, and they also do not suffer from a reduced publication productivity post deanship.
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Notes
The mean value for the dean variable is 0.011, which equals the average number of years in the dean’s office for researchers who were dean (2.478, panel C of Table 1) divided by the average number of yearly observations for deans (29.130, panel C), times the share of deans in the sample (138/1110). Thus, the mean value 0.011 represents the time spells (observation years) of deans among all time spells (observation years). The share of researchers in our data who had been a dean during the observation period is about 12.5%.
When running a balanced panel estimation in which only researchers are included for which all three post-deanship years are available, we find similar results.
The age of becoming a dean is empirically related to our control variables “year of birth” and “age at doctorate”. More recently born researchers in our sample are more likely to be “early” deans since they have fewer “late career years” in which they could become a “late dean”. Also, “early” deans were older when they obtained their doctorate.
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The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (program: “Wissenschaftsökonomie”, grant number: 01PW11008). The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research had no impact on study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of the data or the writing of the manuscript.
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Backes-Gellner, U., Bäker, A. & Pull, K. The Opportunity Costs of Becoming a Dean: Does Leadership in Academia Crowd Out Research?. Schmalenbach Bus Rev 70, 189–208 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41464-018-0048-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41464-018-0048-0