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

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. Testing the hypothesis that an inventory of academics’ motives could explain inter-individual variations in well-being and in time distribution of work activities. 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. 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-R2=.332). In path analyses, the motives explained from 40 to 52% of the variance of the five PERMA elements. 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. Il existe peu de littérature sur les déterminants du bien-être des universitaires et de la distribution temporelle de leurs activités (recherche, enseignement ou activités collectives). Nous avons mis en relation le bien-être au sens de PERMA (Seligman, 2011) avec un inventaire de motivations académiques et avec des mesures d’implication relative dans les activités de travail. Tester l’hypothèse qu’un inventaire de motivations académiques pourrait expliquer des variations interindividuelles du bien-être et de la distribution temporelle des activités. Deux cent vingt-deux maîtres de conférences d’universités françaises ont rempli un questionnaire de motivations professionnelles et une batterie d’échelles de bien-être opérationnalisant le modèle PERMA. Nous avons aussi mesuré la répartition temporelle relative entre activités grâce à un outil conçu à cet effet. Une structure à sept mot