Academics' motivations explain time-allocation and well-being at work

Introduction. - Little is known about the determinants of Faculty members' well-being and the temporal distribution of academics activities (research, teaching, and collective tasks). We linked well-being in the sense of PERMA (Seligman, 2011) to an inventory of academics' motives and to measures of relative involvement in work activities. Aim. - Testing the hypothesis that an inventory of academics' motives could explain inter-individual variations in well-being and in time distribution of work activities. Method. - Two hundred and twenty-two senior lecturers from French universities filled in a questionnaire of professional motives, a collection of well-being scales implementing PERMA. They also provided a measure of their relative time-distribution by means of a tool designed for this purpose. Results. - A seven-motive structure was extracted and confirmed by CFA. It explained 81.7% of the variance of the 21 final items: (1) Contribution to Progress by Research; (2) Teamwork in Teaching; (3) Self-esteem through Teaching; (4) Autonomy in Research Activities; (5) Positive Relationships with Students; (6) Autonomy in Teaching; and (7) Collaboration. The motives explained membership to six Relative 'Temporal Allocation Profiles' extracted by k-means (Cox and Snell pseudo-R-2 = 332). In path analyses, the motives explained from 40 to 52% of the variance of the five PERMA elements. Conclusion. - The study provides three contributions: an original inventory of the structure of academics' motives; a first use of the PERMA model for measuring academics' well-being; and a new tool for measuring differential involvement in academic activities. (C) 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.