The Influence of Personal and Organizational Factors on Researchers’ Attitudes towards Sustainable Research Productivity in Saudi Universities

Abstract

Purpose: This paper studies organisational and personal factors affecting the behaviour of academic staff in Saudi universities. It seeks to investigate the beliefs of academic staff regarding the use of ICT and other factors to enhance the productivity of their scientific research. Also, this study aims to improve the sustainability of publication in Saudi universities. ICT includes using the library system for accessing research repository databases such as Science Direct, Web of Science, Scopus, etc. and other factors. The authors also developed the Importance Performance Map Analysis (IPMA) for these factors in order to provide guidelines for Saudi universities to build university systems to manage and measure the research productivity of academic staff. In summary, this research identifies factors critical to enhancing research productivity in Saudi universities. This will help to improve the sustainability of publication in Saudi universities. By enhancing the sustainability of publication, the reputation of Saudi universities will be improved and the reputation of academic staff in Saudi universities. As well the sustainability of publication will assist the promote of Saudi academic staff. Approach: This paper analysed 200 papers related to the enhancement of research productivity from various research databases such as Science Direct, IEEE and Scopus. We included the usage of ICT in research analysis, university policy, university research funding and the number of publications published by academic staff. The authors used different databases and systematic literature reviews (SLR) to find the most important factors which could improve research productivity in universities. An online questionnaire answered by 375 academic staff from four developing Saudi universities that are Taif University, Taibah University, Jeddah University, Hail University—was used to determine the relationship between information technology factors and research performance together with other factors such as university policy, international collaboration, research funding and job satisfaction. In this study, we used SmartPLS v3 to analyse the results from the questionnaires. Findings: The results show that personal factors such as personal use of ICT and organisational factors such as job satisfaction, university policy, IT funding, international collaboration and the level of ICT use in the university have positive effects on scientific research productivity among academic staff at Saudi universities. Those results are based on the beliefs of academic staff regarding the use of information technology for research purposes and other factors. This paper finds that university policy recorded an importance of 0.523, job satisfaction was 0.224, international collaboration was 0.103, personal use of ICT was 0.102, the level of using ICT in the university was 0.074 and the importance of ICT funding was –0.156. Also, the results from SmartPLS show that university policy has a 0.215 effect size on research performance, job satisfaction has a 0.045 effect size on research performance, international collaboration has a 0.009 effect size on research performance, personal use of ICT has a 0.011 effect size on research performance, a university’s use of ICT has a 0.006 effect size on research performance and ICT funding has a 0.014 effect size on the research performance of academic staff in Saudi universities. These results will help to improve the sustainability of publication in Saudi universities in order to enhance the universities’ rankings and the reputation of academic staff. Sustainability is a target for any organization, both for profit-making entities or non-profit organizations such as universities. This means that Saudi universities should enhance the sustainability of their publication. In order to achieves the goals of higher education institutions. Originality: No study has investigated the factors affecting the performance of academic staff in Arab countries, especially in Saudi universities. Therefore, the originality of this study resides in being the first study to investigate the impact of researchers’ attitudes to enhancing the research productivity performance of researchers in Saudi universities. Also, it is one of the few studies which discusses sustainability in Saudi universities.