Too much Emphasis on Research? An Empirical Examination of the Relationship Between Research and Teaching in Multitasking Environments

While the public is concerned that emphasizing research performance among university faculty results in inadequate attention to undergraduate teaching, research on the relationship between research and teaching in higher education has failed to confirm or deny the validity of this concern. To empirically test this popular concern, we examined how the change in performance-based incentive systems to improve faculty publications influenced student evaluations of their teaching in a Korean university. The analysis of a panel dataset of individual faculty members shows that financial incentives on research rather than teaching could have redirected attention of some professors from teaching to research, thus reducing teaching quality, as proposed by advocates of multitasking theory. Therefore, these findings suggest that, when multiple tasks are significant to organizational values, the incentive structure must assure that each task or activity offers professors the same marginal return on their efforts.