New public management and research productivity – a precarious state of affairs of academic work in the Netherlands

Abstract

New Public Management reforms have fostered universities to focus on performance and competition which has resulted in different pressures to perform and disruption of strong teaching–research balance at universities. The imbalanced division of teaching research workloads may be gendered and can strengthen the differences in research productivity among male and female academics. This study uses survey data of Dutch academics carried out in 2015 at selected three universities to understand how pressure to perform has influenced the workload balance and what is the relationship between teaching–research balance and research productivity of female and male academics across different disciplines in different organizational contexts. The findings support the Hattie and Marsh's Common Wisdom model and show that balanced teaching research workloads improve research productivity across gender groups. Further, we show that the perception of managerialism at a university is an important mediating factor of gender balance in research productivity.