Productivity, Collaboration, and Citizenship in Academic Departments

Background: Junior faculty in academic departments must make two critical decisions. One is how to allocate their time and resources between departmental citizenship tasks and their research pursuits. Another is whether to pursue their research alone or in a group. Little is known how faculty make these decisions, or how departmental policies influence productivity, collaboration between faculty, departmental citizenship, and tenure outcomes. Methods: Two models of faculty behavior in an academic department were constructed. Model A (agent-based) focuses on the choice between citizenship tasks and research productivity. Model B (cellular automata) emphasizes the choice between solo and group research. The two models examine how faculty choices influence success in competing for resources, publishing articles, and achieving tenure, and how departmental norms and policies influence faculty behavior by doling out resource allocation and tenure. Results: In Model A, three different department strategies for the allocation of excess resources were used: in all three cases, the primary determinant of a faculty member achieving tenure was their scientific/research ability. Even when significant department resources were allocated to those who were contributing to ‘citizenship’ tasks, citizenship contribution had little if any affect on achieving tenure. In a model in which substantial financial incentives were created for citizenship, however, more faculty were tenured overall. This was because the increased citizenship activity resulted in a smoother running, more profitable department. In Model B, group size trended towards 4-5 members; and groups were reasonably unstable over more than 2-3 years. Publication quantity depended primarily on length of service; the influence of scientific ability, collaborative skill and group size was minimal. In model B, when the collaborative desire of department members waned over time, the departmental publication output dropped off tremendously and success at achieving tenure also fell dramatically. Under conditions of poor cooperation the performance of a few “stars” stood out much more dramatically from the rest of the department. Thus, while low cooperation reduced department output and the number of faculty achieving tenure, it actually created a condition of better discrimination for inherent scientific quality. Under these conditions, the department ultimately was populated by only two or three “superstars” and tended to coalesce into one giant group. Conclusions: Agent-based and cellular automata models may have some promise in modeling critical career choices in academic departments. The department policies that would lead to improved cooperation are not obvious on the basis of these preliminary models, which exhibit some emergent effects, and where it appears difficult to accrue faculty with desired behaviors with simple reward-benefit rules.