Psychological Contract Breaches and Faculty Retention
Psychological Contract Breaches and Faculty Retention
The modified Delphi procedures generated a list of 27 items that can be used to comprise a measure of psychological contract breaches among pharmacy faculty members. This list potentially could be adapted for use among faculty members in different fields of study. Some of the psychological contract items generated by this study, such as "collegiality/climate in the organization" and "overall workload," describe items that might be promised in most jobs. However, many are specific in reflecting academic autonomy and the tripartite mission of scholarship, teaching, and service. For instance, there were items pertaining specifically to teaching (eg, overall teaching load, freedom to select courses I teach, enrollment/class size); to scholarship (eg, grant writing support, overall expectations for scholarly productivity); and to service (eg, support for professional development, committee service expectations, time for consultation of other outside activities). Academic institutions, even at the departmental level, can use psychological contract items to gauge areas that are lacking in order to help recruit, retain, and develop qualified pharmacy faculty members.
Academic health professional programs such as pharmacy are seeing a strain in the supply of faculty members in part because of increasing student enrollment and a proliferation of new programs. These trends underscore the need for a greater number of experiential sites for introductory and advanced practice experiences. Moreover, a generation of faculty members is preparing to retire, and there is a recurrence of vacant faculty positions that are difficult to match with qualified candidates. In their report published in 2008, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Task Force on Faculty Workforce (formed in 2005) predicted that approximately 1,200 positions will need to be filled over the next 10 years. Even though vacancies or lost positions have decreased from 2008–2009, pharmacy academia is still facing a faculty shortage. There were 374 reported vacancies and/or lost positions in 2009–2010. The need to recruit faculty members to fill vacancies is matched by the need to retain productive faculty members who contribute substantively to the organization and to the academy.
Retention of qualified faculty members might be as challenging as recruitment, given the diversification of unique and interesting job opportunities for pharmacists with postgraduate degrees and the heightened expectations of faculty members. Turnover in academic pharmacy has become a problem that might be more acute among pharmacy practice and female faculty members. In a survey of pharmacy faculty members, 1 in 5 respondents indicated an intention of leaving their current academic institution during the ensuing 2 years. The most recent AACP Task Force on Faculty Workforce argues for a focus on recruitment and retention of qualified pharmacy faculty members through multiple lenses.
One of the major draws into an academic career is the opportunity to teach and mold or impact the lives of others. Pharmacy practice faculty members have cited the opportunity to combine teaching with direct patient care as 1 of the more compelling aspects of the job. This is well reflected in the items proffered from the panel, as 6 of the items identified were specifically related to teaching. Grant writing, which is 1 of the greatest deterrents to pharmacy students choosing a career in academia, was identified as an important item in a psychological contract. Salary, another reason faculty members cited for leaving an institution, was also reflected in the psychological contract breach items (ie, annual salary adjustment, fringe benefits, start-up funds). Excessive workload is 1 of the most frequently cited reasons for pharmacy faculty members leaving an institution. Overall workload, overall teaching load, and expectations for scholarly productivity were all included in the items proffered as important components of a putative measure of psychological contract.
Many faculty members experience role stress throughout their career. As such, it is important to uphold the balance among teaching, research, and service. Additionally, the opportunity to engage in this triad has been identified as the most attractive aspect influencing the decision to accept a faculty position. Benchmarking has been proposed in pharmacy academia to help with measuring the quality of educational and research programs. Although Bosso and colleagues do not address psychological contracts by name, the clear communication and measurement culture, which they argue are needed for benchmarking, should help uphold psychological contracts, the fulfillment of which has been correlated with intention to stay with a university.
Deans and department chairs play an important role in developing a transparent and responsible culture, considering that department chair support is a direct influence on turnover intentions. The AACP's recent focus on department chair development acknowledges the importance of this relationship. Mentoring is another effective approach to retaining faculty members and decreasing work stress. The Delphi panel in the current study found mentoring to be an important aspect to include in psychological contracts (eg, formal mentoring program, and informal mentoring). A sample of university scientists perceived that if their psychological contracts were upheld, they achieved greater research productivity and career advancement.
Although the Delphi was used primarily to inform an instrument for future research on the relationship of psychological contract breaches with other work-related factors affecting pharmacy faculty members, its findings also have relevance to the practice of recruitment and retention in colleges and schools of pharmacy. These items indicate what factors are important to pharmacy faculty in pursuing a career in academia and should be considered when recruiting, interviewing, and developing faculty members. Frequent clear communication and mentoring specifically on these items may reduce the incidence of psychological contract breaches as well as ameliorate the repercussions that may follow a psychological contract breach.
The results of any Delphi procedure are limited by the expertise of the panel participants and the level of diligence with which they carried out the process. Based on their comments to the investigators and responses to open-ended questions, the Delphi procedure survey participants in the current study seem to have approached this responsibility with diligence. However, their conforming to their peers' ratings of items in latter rounds on the basis of convenience rather than earnest beliefs cannot be ruled out. Regardless of the panel's level of expertise, a different set of participants may have generated a slightly different set of items. A purposive sampling strategy was employed to gain representation from the basic, clinical, and social/administrative sciences, in addition to representation by type of institution, faculty rank, and participation in administrative activities. If a focus group had been used instead of a Delphi procedure, the opinions and items important to disciplines with lesser representation or from junior faculty members may have been minimized. Because of the anonymous nature of the Delphi, if individual faculty members thought they were the only ones representing their respective disciplines, they may have been more open to voicing opinions than they would have been in a face-to-face interview. Faculty members were not sought purposively from all 8 academic sections denoted by AACP; however, there were participants with membership and experience in more than 1 section, such as pharmacy practice with experience and/or responsibilities in experiential education and basic sciences with joint or combined appointments in pharmacology and medicinal chemistry.
Researcher bias is another possible limitation. The research team selected the original definition, the first set of instructions, and the development of the round 2 list of items from the comments and suggestions generated by the first round. Although there are several ways to define organizational citizenship behaviors, the research team intentionally chose to provide only 1 definition. This decision was made to lower participant burden/confusion and to allow the generation of items to transpire under the auspices of a well-renowned and accepted conceptual definition. The list was developed from participants' comments and suggested items, which limited the influence of the researchers in an attempt to maximize participant input.
The proposed list of items requires further validation and reliability testing for use as a measure of psychological contract breaches in a department, college, or school. The items generated from this process should be employed in studies with larger sample sizes and validated using quantitative designs. Further refinement of the psychological contract breach measure should include item analysis for reliability and factor analysis to evidence convergent and discriminant construct validity. The use of this study's procedures to inform item generation followed by the aforementioned quantitative approaches is commensurate with recommendations for the development of measures used in survey research.
Identification and benchmarking of constituent faculty's perceived psychological contract breaches can become an important component in tracking the morale and climate of an organization. It might also assist administrators with identifying faculty expectations and unmet needs and with tailoring their interviewing and hiring processes. Finally, the measurement of psychological contract breaches can be helpful for administrators and researchers in determining their link to satisfaction, productivity, and other work-related outcomes.
Discussion
The modified Delphi procedures generated a list of 27 items that can be used to comprise a measure of psychological contract breaches among pharmacy faculty members. This list potentially could be adapted for use among faculty members in different fields of study. Some of the psychological contract items generated by this study, such as "collegiality/climate in the organization" and "overall workload," describe items that might be promised in most jobs. However, many are specific in reflecting academic autonomy and the tripartite mission of scholarship, teaching, and service. For instance, there were items pertaining specifically to teaching (eg, overall teaching load, freedom to select courses I teach, enrollment/class size); to scholarship (eg, grant writing support, overall expectations for scholarly productivity); and to service (eg, support for professional development, committee service expectations, time for consultation of other outside activities). Academic institutions, even at the departmental level, can use psychological contract items to gauge areas that are lacking in order to help recruit, retain, and develop qualified pharmacy faculty members.
Academic health professional programs such as pharmacy are seeing a strain in the supply of faculty members in part because of increasing student enrollment and a proliferation of new programs. These trends underscore the need for a greater number of experiential sites for introductory and advanced practice experiences. Moreover, a generation of faculty members is preparing to retire, and there is a recurrence of vacant faculty positions that are difficult to match with qualified candidates. In their report published in 2008, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Task Force on Faculty Workforce (formed in 2005) predicted that approximately 1,200 positions will need to be filled over the next 10 years. Even though vacancies or lost positions have decreased from 2008–2009, pharmacy academia is still facing a faculty shortage. There were 374 reported vacancies and/or lost positions in 2009–2010. The need to recruit faculty members to fill vacancies is matched by the need to retain productive faculty members who contribute substantively to the organization and to the academy.
Retention of qualified faculty members might be as challenging as recruitment, given the diversification of unique and interesting job opportunities for pharmacists with postgraduate degrees and the heightened expectations of faculty members. Turnover in academic pharmacy has become a problem that might be more acute among pharmacy practice and female faculty members. In a survey of pharmacy faculty members, 1 in 5 respondents indicated an intention of leaving their current academic institution during the ensuing 2 years. The most recent AACP Task Force on Faculty Workforce argues for a focus on recruitment and retention of qualified pharmacy faculty members through multiple lenses.
One of the major draws into an academic career is the opportunity to teach and mold or impact the lives of others. Pharmacy practice faculty members have cited the opportunity to combine teaching with direct patient care as 1 of the more compelling aspects of the job. This is well reflected in the items proffered from the panel, as 6 of the items identified were specifically related to teaching. Grant writing, which is 1 of the greatest deterrents to pharmacy students choosing a career in academia, was identified as an important item in a psychological contract. Salary, another reason faculty members cited for leaving an institution, was also reflected in the psychological contract breach items (ie, annual salary adjustment, fringe benefits, start-up funds). Excessive workload is 1 of the most frequently cited reasons for pharmacy faculty members leaving an institution. Overall workload, overall teaching load, and expectations for scholarly productivity were all included in the items proffered as important components of a putative measure of psychological contract.
Many faculty members experience role stress throughout their career. As such, it is important to uphold the balance among teaching, research, and service. Additionally, the opportunity to engage in this triad has been identified as the most attractive aspect influencing the decision to accept a faculty position. Benchmarking has been proposed in pharmacy academia to help with measuring the quality of educational and research programs. Although Bosso and colleagues do not address psychological contracts by name, the clear communication and measurement culture, which they argue are needed for benchmarking, should help uphold psychological contracts, the fulfillment of which has been correlated with intention to stay with a university.
Deans and department chairs play an important role in developing a transparent and responsible culture, considering that department chair support is a direct influence on turnover intentions. The AACP's recent focus on department chair development acknowledges the importance of this relationship. Mentoring is another effective approach to retaining faculty members and decreasing work stress. The Delphi panel in the current study found mentoring to be an important aspect to include in psychological contracts (eg, formal mentoring program, and informal mentoring). A sample of university scientists perceived that if their psychological contracts were upheld, they achieved greater research productivity and career advancement.
Although the Delphi was used primarily to inform an instrument for future research on the relationship of psychological contract breaches with other work-related factors affecting pharmacy faculty members, its findings also have relevance to the practice of recruitment and retention in colleges and schools of pharmacy. These items indicate what factors are important to pharmacy faculty in pursuing a career in academia and should be considered when recruiting, interviewing, and developing faculty members. Frequent clear communication and mentoring specifically on these items may reduce the incidence of psychological contract breaches as well as ameliorate the repercussions that may follow a psychological contract breach.
The results of any Delphi procedure are limited by the expertise of the panel participants and the level of diligence with which they carried out the process. Based on their comments to the investigators and responses to open-ended questions, the Delphi procedure survey participants in the current study seem to have approached this responsibility with diligence. However, their conforming to their peers' ratings of items in latter rounds on the basis of convenience rather than earnest beliefs cannot be ruled out. Regardless of the panel's level of expertise, a different set of participants may have generated a slightly different set of items. A purposive sampling strategy was employed to gain representation from the basic, clinical, and social/administrative sciences, in addition to representation by type of institution, faculty rank, and participation in administrative activities. If a focus group had been used instead of a Delphi procedure, the opinions and items important to disciplines with lesser representation or from junior faculty members may have been minimized. Because of the anonymous nature of the Delphi, if individual faculty members thought they were the only ones representing their respective disciplines, they may have been more open to voicing opinions than they would have been in a face-to-face interview. Faculty members were not sought purposively from all 8 academic sections denoted by AACP; however, there were participants with membership and experience in more than 1 section, such as pharmacy practice with experience and/or responsibilities in experiential education and basic sciences with joint or combined appointments in pharmacology and medicinal chemistry.
Researcher bias is another possible limitation. The research team selected the original definition, the first set of instructions, and the development of the round 2 list of items from the comments and suggestions generated by the first round. Although there are several ways to define organizational citizenship behaviors, the research team intentionally chose to provide only 1 definition. This decision was made to lower participant burden/confusion and to allow the generation of items to transpire under the auspices of a well-renowned and accepted conceptual definition. The list was developed from participants' comments and suggested items, which limited the influence of the researchers in an attempt to maximize participant input.
The proposed list of items requires further validation and reliability testing for use as a measure of psychological contract breaches in a department, college, or school. The items generated from this process should be employed in studies with larger sample sizes and validated using quantitative designs. Further refinement of the psychological contract breach measure should include item analysis for reliability and factor analysis to evidence convergent and discriminant construct validity. The use of this study's procedures to inform item generation followed by the aforementioned quantitative approaches is commensurate with recommendations for the development of measures used in survey research.
Identification and benchmarking of constituent faculty's perceived psychological contract breaches can become an important component in tracking the morale and climate of an organization. It might also assist administrators with identifying faculty expectations and unmet needs and with tailoring their interviewing and hiring processes. Finally, the measurement of psychological contract breaches can be helpful for administrators and researchers in determining their link to satisfaction, productivity, and other work-related outcomes.
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