Whether academic and teaching staff are universal

Abstract

Academic personnel routinely carry out a wide range of teaching, research, administrative, and expert functions. However, many of them do not focus on universality, but in fact specialize in performing one or several academic functions (profiles). The article deals with the discrepancy between the traditional distribution of professional duties of academic and teaching staff (ATS) and their actual performance. The research methodology is based on the positive agency theory, which allows explaining the peculiarities of social and labour relations in the academic sphere. The research methods of descriptive, frequency and regression analysis are used, including the method of logistic regression. The empirical basis includes the results of a survey conducted in 2022 of 207 academic and teaching staff members of the Southern Federal University, Russia. The questionnaire was compiled of the aspects of academic, teaching, expert and administrative profiles, as well as the questions about the socio-economic characteristics of respondents, the professional role they prefer, labour productivity and salary satisfaction. The results of studying the structure and the ATS’s choice of professional roles (profiles) can be used to solve problems in the field of social and labour relations at the university. According to the findings, the share of employees choosing specialization and the share of ‘universal’ employees were distributed equally; a discrepancy was found between respondents’ preference for performing one or another function and the actual work they do in the academic field. It was revealed that the specialization of work in a certain profile has a significant impact on labour productivity, and an increase in the number of work profiles reduces the likelihood of being in a group of employees satisfied with the correlation between their salary and the volume and complexity of the work performed.