On the Perceived Gap between Performance and Reward
University professors like to complain about the insufficient pay they receive for all their hard work in teaching and research, pointing out that the high costs of living in big cities means that they and their families can just about make ends meet. The so-called Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday professors, who parachute in from their actual places of residence for three days of work, feel particularly hard done by: they have to pay for two abodes. Comparisons are made with jobs in the private sector, where allegedly the pay is much higher. Are we witnessing the silent formation of a new academic lumpenproletariat? How can this feeling of pauperization among a privileged layer of society be explained?
Research into the world of work offers the following explanation for the perceived hardship within the professoriate: it is caused by a ‘gratification crisis’, that is, by a gap between performance and reward that is perceived to be too great. The classic symptoms suffered by employees experiencing a ‘gratification crisis’ are cardiovascular disease, back pain, and alcoholism. In other words, the organization pays for the crisis as the employee withdraws into himself and develops a lower tolerance to stress or a pronounced tendency to avoid work.
What causes a ‘gratification crisis’ is not an ‘objective’ discrepancy between the work done and the payment received – economists have, in any case, long since given up on the search for criteria for judging what counts as an ‘appropriate’ wage or salary. Rather, a gratification crisis is connected to an employee’s purely subjective feeling that more performance and experience do not lead to more recognition and rewards.
Gratification crises emerge in places where commitment cannot be rewarded with promotion. Professors therefore share their fate with teachers, bus drivers, and flight attendants. Once you have jumped through all the hoops of an academic career, once you have successfully completed your teacher training, passed your test as a bus driver, or finished the necessary training for becoming a flight attendant, you have reached the end of the road. The position of ‘head bus driver’ has yet to be invented. A flight attendant is not on the way to becoming a pilot. And should a teacher become a principal, she pays for this by having to do a job that has hardly anything to do with her original training. In this case, the organizational invention of ‘having a career’ fails to deliver, because neither the organization nor its members are keen to see too much internal mobility.
Self-help groups in which gratification crises can be discussed, back posture training financed by the healthcare system, or programmes for the prevention of addiction do not offer promising ways forward with this problem. Rather, the question is how organizations can create surrogates for careers. In the case of flight attendants, the crisis can be slowed down by letting them advance from economy to business class, and then to first class. Whether an attendant will look after drunken tourists on the way to Mallorca, take care of the allegedly more civilized business travellers, or serve champagne to famous celebrities could be decided according to seniority before each flight. But what about our suffering professors?
Performance-related pay for professors, a proposal put forward by quite a few presidents of universities and heads of higher education institutions, would surely not create the sought-after enthusiasm for teaching or lead to more and better research publications. But the smallest differences in the allocation of non-monetary rewards could solve the gratification crisis among academics. This is a possible programme for the prevention of illness and addiction among the professoriate. Why should the methods that work for flight attendants not work for professors?
