Anne is an assistant professor in a tenure-track position at a research-intensive university. She is married with one small child and about to apply for tenure. She is struggling to maintain balance between work and family life and is not really sure about what is expected of her to meet the requirements for tenure.
She has applied to SSHRC for several grants and while all were viewed as worthy of being funded, the grant committee’s allocations were exhausted before reaching her place in their rankings. She has produced, on average, one first-authored journal article a year with several published in top-tier journals. She is a dedicated teacher, but she’s not sure if this will count in her favour for tenure. She spends several hours each night working on class preparations and writing up her research at the expense of time spent with her partner and child.
She is trying to put together her SSHRC application for an operating grant at the same time as applying for tenure. She is concerned about the reaction she will receive from her external referees and her colleagues. What will they think of her case? She stays awake at night worrying about this and has begun to show several signs of physical illness. Sound familiar?
It is not only junior faculty without tenure and contract academic staff who may be plagued by stress in post-secondary institutions. Stress has become a serious and growing problem of academic work with the deleterious consequences of decreased job satisfaction, reduced morale, ill health and decreased productivity. These issues are aggravated by restructuring, use of short-term contracts, external scrutiny and accountability and major reductions in funding of post-secondary education.
National studies in both Australia and the UK found that academic staff suffered from high levels of stress. The Australian study found that academic staff were stressed to a much greater degree than people in the general population. They related the increase in stress to diminishing resources, increased teaching loads and student/staff ratios, pressure to attract external funds, job insecurity, poor management and a lack of recognition and reward.1
The study shows that academic staff were dissatisfied with their jobs in general, and more specifically with university management, hours of work, industrial relations, promotion prospects and money. Work-related psychological strain was highest and job satisfaction the lowest among junior academic ranks — the equivalent of assistant and junior associate professors in North America. Among the findings, psychological strain was best predicted by job insecurity and work demands. By contrast, job satisfaction was best predicted by procedural fairness, trust in heads and senior management and autonomy. Most important, the ongoing stress levels were related to changes in the physical health of the respondents with those expressing the highest levels also reporting the occurrence of physical symptoms of health-related problems.
The UK study concluded “occupational stress in university staff is widespread and lends further support to the growing evidence that universities no longer provide the low-stress working environments they once did.”2 In particular, the study found that academic staff were stressed by coworkers not pulling their weight, lack of control over decisions affecting their jobs, lack of resources, not being informed about job-relevant information, work interfering with home and personal life, insufficient time to do their jobs at the quality level the academics felt necessary and the level of their pay and benefits.
Similar to the Australian findings, respondents were concerned with a lack of trust in senior management and their institutions. They also expressed low levels of commitment to their organization, low levels of job satisfaction and high levels of job insecurity.
James Turk, CAUT’s executive director, said the same factors that have led to high levels of occupational stress in Australian and UK universities have also affected Canadian post-secondary institutions over the last decade.
“There is little doubt those findings also apply to Canada,” he said. “We lack, however, reliable information on the extent to which academic staff in Canada have experienced occupational stress.”
The issue is of critical importance, Turk said, noting CAUT is sponsoring a pan-Canadian study of work-related stress. The researchers expect to determine stress levels in academic staff; the variability in academic stress over academic and demographic variables; the work-related predictors of health outcomes in academic staff; and the work-related predictors of job satisfaction and other outcome variables in the academic population.
In early 2006, a random sample of more than 6,000 Canadian academics will be asked to participate in an online survey that addresses these goals. The study will be conducted by occupational health researchers at Hamilton’s McMaster University and Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
“No one will be asked to participate until the research ethics boards at both universities have approved the study,” Turk said. “Participants will not be asked to identify themselves. An independent, commercial site will host the survey and only anonymous responses will be returned to researchers.”
One limitation of both the Australian and UK studies was a relatively low response rate, Turk points out. “We encourage academics who are invited to participate in CAUT’s study to complete the survey so that we may have a true and unbiased representation of the impact of stress on Canadian academics,” he said.
“The information we obtain will not only help us to meet our objectives but also will help us develop policy in the area of occupational health for use in lobbying governments and universities and help us offer our member associations practical suggestions about how to implement contract language and other preventative options that would benefit the health of their members.”
1 Winefield, A.H., Gillespie, N., Stough, C., Dua J. & Hapuararchchi, J. Occupational Stress in Australian Universities: A National Survey 2002. Melbourne: National Tertiary Education Union.
2 Tytherleigh, M.Y., Webb, C., Cooper, C.L., & Ricketts, C. (2005). Occupational stress in UK higher education institutions: a comparative study of all staff categories. Higher Education Research & Development, 24, 41–61.