The effects of performance rewards? Robert Dur understands that the reporter asks about it, but it still makes him laugh: “Is that still in my bio on the UM site?” The professor of Behavioural economics from Rotterdam had provided a different text, he says. Because even though he does research into those effects, his keynote speech for Maastricht University’s Foundation Day celebrations in the Sint-Janskerk on Friday will be about something different: “It is about the question how people and the organisations for which they work, can flourish. I want to broach three points: how you can make work more meaningful, how you can help upcoming students make better study choices and, if I manage to squeeze it into the 20 minutes I have, the discrimination on the labour market and how you can fight it. The Netherlands is not doing well in this area; labour market discrimination has increased in the past decade. There is no ready-made solution: diversity training for example, appears to have no or hardly any effect.”
Scientists with three legs
Having said that, he would like to say something about performance rewards, and how this might work in a university context. Or not, he adds. “Research has shown that in order to have a successful faculty, you need employees who do not overly specialise, but who are good at research, education and management. ‘Scientists with three legs,’ is what we used to call them here in Rotterdam. Of course, nobody is equally good in all areas, but in your selection policy you have to strive towards not appointing just specialists. Most performance reward systems, on the other hand, are unilateral. They reward excellence in only one of those fields.” In doing so, they promote far-reaching specialisation.
Publication pressure
In practice, the emphasis often lies on research. After all, there must be publications, preferably a lot and in top-notch international journals: that is success. The drawback is called ‘publication pressure and high workloads’. Dur grins. “Sociologist Willem Schinkel once wrote in NRC that researchers point to The Hague in the case of high workloads: the minister needs to pay more money! But the Minister of Education does not determine how much someone should publish – we, the scientists, put that pressure on each other. Sometimes formally – the regulations state how much you should publish in order to be eligible for a promotion – but much more often informally, due to the culture in a field, faculty or department.”
The question is, he says, how to change that culture: “You don’t do that just by changing the regulations.” How do you do it then? Dur refers to the top 40 of Dutch economists that the trend-setting journal Economisch Statistische Berichten publishes annually. “It used to be a case of counting how many publications someone had had over the past five years. When it was decided to look at the quality of a selection of a person’s articles, this led to noticeable peace in the economic world in the Netherlands: the quantitative pressure was off, the focus was on quality.”
Good academic citizenship
He feels that departments and faculties could do something similar. “You yourself could decide, for example, to not just celebrate publications in the absolute top-notch journals, but to also highlight ‘sub top-notch publications’: hard work like that should also been seen. Just like someone’s teaching performance. Do you only appreciate those who implement innovations? Or also those who teach in such a way that students still remember the lectures years later? Also, don’t allow yourself to be blindly led by a few student evaluations, but have someone who is a good judge of these matters sit in on a lecture from time to time and spar with a lecturer. And be aware of what people contribute to the work of others, because research and education is almost always teamwork: even if you work on an article alone, you ask feedback from others. In fact, this is about rewarding good academic citizenship.”
Crude culture
‘Recognition and Rewards,’ striving for a broader view of scientists’ work, with more attention for fields such as education and leadership, he therefore applauds. “As long as,” he emphasises, “it doesn’t ultimately lead to specialisation, such as ‘research professors’ who hardly teach anymore or ‘teaching professors’ who hardly do any research. There are times when I fear this will happen. Teaching and research reinforce each other, this must not be lost.”
Which brings us back to the question what is the best way to reward performance. Money could be a way to achieve this, says Dur, but it is not the only means. “That crude, unilateral culture was at its peak in the nineteen-nineties and at the beginning of this century. Things have changed since then: people also want attention and acknowledgment.”