Shared Work Load and Team Spirit - Correlations between University Students and University Personnel

Abstract

The felt load of life is often mirrored to well-being and how people feel. Typically organizations are looking the workload of their staff because that is the thing which organizations can affect and made adjustments. Organization´s culture often starts to change people to be alike and large tendencies and trends are carving people to feel and act as same. In this research we are looking how university students and personnel feel about heir workload and how they feel their team spirit and mood. This research will be conducted by utilizing two different questionnaire tools called Eezy Spirit and Student barometer. Eezy spirit is a questionnaire, which has been developed to study employee experience and it is widely used in Finland in different industries. It was chosen to be the one for studying the staff experience since it has questions about felt justice and personnel´s feelings towards management. Student barometer is a questionnaire for higher education students in Finland. It´s objectives are to provide data and information for researchers, research institutes education developers and decision makers in the institutes. Student barometer handles a variety of different matters from student life by asking students´ opinions from quality of studies to their civil life activities and their expectations of the future. This research will be based on material from Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS). Data will be gathered from Eezy spirit employee experience questionnaires done annually 2016-2020. The study was done to whole personnel in TUAS and number of respondents varied from 598 to 633 in different years. Respondents answered to propositions in Likert scale 1-4 and “I don´t know”. Number of propositions varied between years from 63 to 65. Respondents were grouped to units which were responsible for specific degree programs. Student barometer data consists of 2165 individual students as respondents in year 2019. They answered at most to 201 different questions and propositions. As the questionnaire was dynamic and depended partly on the previous answers, not all the questions and propositions were targeted to all of the students. Also the students’ responses were grouped by their degree programs, which makes it possible to compare the felt justice of the staff members to that of the students per each degree program. We utilize data sets between years 2016-2020. Data is analyzed with Excel and SPSS. Samples were taken from the data mass and were composed to a statistical model with excel spreadsheet. Staff members as well as students were grouped under schools and arithmetic averages and standard deviations were calculated to each proposition. After calculating the arithmetic averages further analysis was done with SPSS statistical analysis program. In SPSS proposition’s correlations were analyzed by single tailed Pearson correlation.The overall research question is: Is there a correlation between 1) workload for university students and staff 2) team spirit and relationships in organization? If so, how can this correlation be interpreted and what conclusions can be made? Future research aspects and practical recommendations will also be issued in the paper.