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ARC: Teaching: MEQ: Fall 2001: Post-Tenure Productivity

Professional Development Workshop: Strategies for Achieving Career Longetivity

William L. Cron, Southern Methodist University
Leigh M. McAllister, University of Texas 
Rosann L. Spiro, Indiana University
William G. Zikmund, Oklahoma State University

Summary by: Daniel M. Ladik, University of South Florida

Staying productive in the post-tenure segment of a career is not an easy task for many professors. Some assistant and associate professors work so hard in achieving tenure that they "burn themselves out" in the process. As a result, these professors decrease their research output after tenure, losing their passion that brought them to academia. An appropriate question then follows; "how can professors stay productive beyond tenure?"

An excellent session was held at the 2001 American Marketing Association's Summer Educators' conference that addressed this issue directly. The session, organized by Dr. Les Carlson of Clemson University, featured a panel of four professors: William L. Cron, Southern Methodist University, Leigh M. McAlister, University of Texas, Rosann L. Spiro, Indiana University, and William G. Zikmund, Oklahoma State University. Each of these professors not only experienced success early in their careers' but also maintained their productivity beyond tenure.

The overriding goal of the session was to uncover their strategies for achieving career longevity by sharing the experiences from the professors on the panel. As chair of the session, Dr. Carlson organized the session around three main questions:

"What is the best advise you could give someone to keep his or her career active, particularly in the post tenure and promotion years?"

"What are the worst things that you can do that might undermine an active career in the post tenure years?"

"Who are some of the people that your try to emulate to help keep their careers fresh in the post tenure years?"

From these three questions, a number of common themes were cultivated from the panelists' responses. Clearly one of these themes was "have fun." In short, people who enjoy what they are doing continue to do so. The review and publishing process can be a very time consuming, and emotional process. Reviewers' comments can be quite harsh, which in turn, becomes a demotivator for future research projects. Dr. Spiro stressed, "to get involved in [research topics] that you are interested in examining." If a professor truly enjoys researching in their specific topic area, then they will be better prepared to handle the rigorous, and at times tedious review process. Dr. Spiro also stated that one of the benefits in an academic career is in almost all cases, the professor is allowed to chose the topic area for their research projects. The same certainly cannot be said for practitioners, as corporate and/or client needs drive the research project. Some successful researchers stay involved in a particular research stream over a number of articles and years, which then associates their work with that particular body of literature. Dr. Spiro also advocated changing research streams if a professor is losing their passion in a particular research topic.

Dr. Zikmund shared similar ideas with Dr. Spiro stating, "try to make your work your leisure." Before attending the conference, Dr. Zikmund read a book discussing the differences among work, time, and leisure. He summarized the book's finding stating, "you're at work when you're doing what you do not what to do, and you are at leisure when you are doing exact what you want to do." In a similar premise, Dr. McAlister added, "do not do research just to get publications. [With that objective] the research will not capture your imagination." Dr. Cron continued with this topic stating, he felt "very lucky that he has fun with the people he works with, as these [individuals] are my true friends." In this example, the people a professor works with, either in the department or in the discipline are the same people they spend their time socializing and having and fun.

A second theme that was developed in the session was to continue to stay involved with current and former doctoral students. Doctoral students have strong curiosities and lots of drive for the research process. Dr. McAlister advocated other professors to, "invest in young people and tap that energy." By helping past and present doctoral students with their research projects and dissertations, quite often professors get intellectually challenged and stimulated. As a result, the professor stays actively involved with the research process. Dr. Spiro agreed with Dr. McAlister as she feels professors should, "payback" and work with doctoral students. Dr. Spiro believes that having a strong mentor such as your dissertation chair helps a new assistant professor to "put their best foot forward" when they leave for their first academic position.

Career balance was a third dominant theme that evolved in the conversations from the four professors. In fact, this was the first point Dr. Cron emphasized from his experiences. Dr. Cron described how he organizes his goals and objectives into specific areas, allowing for easy monitoring. At the same time, he emphasized that he rarely experiences boredom because he is involved with other projects. On a similar note, Dr. Spiro warned the audience that professors should "learn how to say no" to some projects. Burnout can be easily achieved if a professor attempts to juggle too many tasks at one time. As a final comment, Dr. Spiro suggested one way to avoid burnout is, stop and do something different such as "take a sabbatical and come back [reenergized]."

In addition to all the positive strategies to achieving career longevity, the panel also suggested a number of avoidance strategies. If research is a professor's passion, then they should concentrate on research projects. There are many areas a professor can progress towards later in their career that will actually decrease one's available time to work on research. For example, "don't become a department chairmen," "don't become a dean," or "be careful with the 'dark side' and textbook publishing." All three of these examples arose in the session but the researchers stressed that these are only bad if your primary goal is to focus on research. Another avoidance strategy Dr. McAlister offered was to shun "stretch goals that do not get rewarded." Stretch goals are attempted when an individual wishes to challenge him or herself. A problem arises if time and energy are exerted on a project without reward for the researcher. In this case, the stretch goal's resources were not well spent. A third avoidance theme suggested by Dr. Cron was to "reject equity theory." Comparing oneself to some reference group in pay, publications, or other criteria and easily cause negative emotions than may result in the loss of focus or direction. Dr. Spiro also re-emphasized this point stating, " [do] not to play comparison games." In short, it is best to utilize one's cognitive energy on their research projects and not on mental comparison games. Finally, Dr. McAlister argued that a professor should closely examine if one really wishes to single author articles the majority of the time. She stated, there are times, "you need someone to help you get through the review process."

In closing, a fitting way to conclude topic on strategies to achieving career longevity is to examine a fourth question that was asked by Dr. Carlson:

"If you had your career to do over, is there anything that you would choose to do differently?"

Not surprisingly coming from a panel of four successful professors, not one suggestion was offered.