Tenure and Merit Pay as Rewards for Research, Teaching, and Service at a Research University.
This study grew out of a specific question about whether teaching and service affect tenure and merit pay decisions at a research university and from a more general concern with rewards and sanctions in educational institutions. In a perfectly rational system, it might be supposed, an organization such as a university would provide incentives and rewards for behavior that it seeks to encourage and sanctions for what it seeks to discourage [10, pp. 53-54]. To do otherwise would appear dysfunctional. However, Weick [26, 27] has examined the functionality of ambiguous and seemingly disorderly relationships and has suggested that subgroups or components of an organization can be loosely or tightly coupled depending on the degree to which a change in one variable results in changes in other variables in the system. Tight coupling, Weick suggested, is not the only functional way in which variables may be related. Previous research on faculty rewards in colleges and universities has established relatively tight coupling between faculty work in research and institutionally dispensed rewards such as salary and promotion. Fulton and Trow [6], Katz [II], Rossman [19], Siegfried and White [21], and Tuckman and others [22, 23, 24, 25] found statistically significant relationships between publications and salary. In other studies, researchers found that publications were related to salary increments [9], supplemental income [16], assignment to higher-level classes [8], and promotability [20].