To address the present research gap on relations between motivational beliefs, self-regulation failure, and psychological health in post-secondary faculty, the present study used associative latent growth modeling to longitudinally examine relationships between self-efficacy, procrastination, and burnout (emotional exhaustion) in faculty internationally. Findings from 3,071 faculty participants (70% female, 69 countries) over three time points (5–6 month lags) showed greater self-efficacy at baseline to correspond with lower procrastination and burnout, and procrastination to be positively related to burnout (intercepts). Growth analyses additionally revealed stronger relations between increases in self-efficacy, procrastination, and burnout over time (slopes). Supplemental cross-lagged analyses provided causal evidence of burnout as an antecedent of self-efficacy and procrastination, underscoring intervention and policy efforts to address overwork and exhaustion in post-secondary faculty.

Funding: This study was funded by an Insight Grant to NH from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant (SSHRC 435-2013-1099; http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Copyright: © 2019 Hall et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Introduction

Over the past 20 years, faculty at post-secondary institutions internationally have experienced rising levels of stress and burnout due to increasing demands for quality instruction, research excellence, and service contributions without commensurate increases in institutional support [1–3]. Beyond the notable impact of institutional demands (e.g., teaching [4]; research [5]) and support (e.g., teaching [6–7]), existing faculty development research has also explored the role of psychological factors in well-being levels (for reviews, see [8–9]). With respect to motivational variables, perceptions of competence in post-secondary faculty has received particular attention given findings showing higher levels of perceived competence (e.g., self-efficacy, control) to consistently correspond with greater teaching success [10–11], research productivity [12–13], and well-being [5,14]. Although adaptive self-regulation strategies have received less empirical attention in faculty research to date (e.g., humor coping [15]), self-regulation failure has been repeatedly examined in relation to both faculty productivity (e.g., writing procrastination [16–17]) and burnout (e.g., inability to cope [1]). However, there to date exists no published research exploring longitudinal relations between faculty motivation, self-regulation, and well-being thereby limiting our understanding of potential causal relationships between these critical psychological variables. To address this research gap, the present longitudinal study evaluated faculty perceptions of self-efficacy, procrastination, and burnout (emotional exhaustion) at three points using latent growth and cross-lagged structural equation models to provide an in-depth analysis of hypothesized relations between these variables with respect to valence, magnitude, as well as causality.

Motivation in faculty: Self-efficacy beliefs Motivational variables have consistently been found to correspond with productivity and job satisfaction in post-secondary faculty (e.g., perceived value [18]; perceived competence [19]), with perceptions of self-efficacy having been previously examined in relation to both faculty employment and well-being outcomes. The theoretical construct of self-efficacy is derived from social-cognitive theory [20–21] and is defined as beliefs or confidence regarding one’s capability to manage and perform specific behaviors. Self-efficacy has long been found to be a strong predictor of performance outcomes across academic populations over and above the effects of prior achievement, including K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students (e.g., for reviews, see [22–23]) as well as K-12 teachers [24]. With respect to post-secondary faculty, international research over the past three decades has also explored this social-cognitive construct as reflective of faculty beliefs in their ability to teach (e.g., The Netherlands [25]; China [26]), conduct research (e.g., Turkey [27]; U.S. [28]), and engage in service (e.g., public outreach among U.S. faculty [29–30]), among other academic activities (e.g., administration and consulting, Australia [31]; computing, Nigeria [32]; see also [33]). In addition to recent qualitative work investigating critical social-environmental contributors to faculty self-efficacy beliefs (e.g., mentorship, collegiality; Australia [34]; Mexico [35]; U.S. [10]), research on faculty self-efficacy has consistently explored demographic antecedents including gender, rank, and discipline. Whereas some studies report no gender differences in teaching or research self-efficacy [31,36], other findings persistently show male faculty to report higher levels of self-efficacy for research and service than females [26,28,37–38]. Similar to findings on teaching self-efficacy among K-12 educators [39], existing research has also shown faculty self-efficacy beliefs for research to be higher among senior relative to junior faculty members [31,36]. Prior studies have further examined faculty self-efficacy beliefs specific to a given discipline (e.g., STEM [30]; foreign language instruction [27,35]), with scattered findings showing faculty self-efficacy levels to be more problematic in specific disciplines relative to others (e.g., education [33]; social sciences [26]; accounting [31]). Longitudinal research has also been conducted to examine changes in faculty self-efficacy levels, specifically to evaluate the cognitive effects of professional development initiatives. Alongside multiple intervention studies showing pedagogical training programs to increase teaching self-efficacy in faculty internationally (U.S. [40]; Finland [41–42]; India, South Africa [43]), recent findings further show faculty development efforts to improve self-efficacy for research self-efficacy (Turkey [27]) and service over time (i.e., for engaging in gender-equity-promoting behaviors; U.S. [44]). Faculty self-efficacy has also been repeatedly assessed in relation to critical outcome measures, with findings showing greater teaching self-efficacy to correspond with indicators of teaching effectiveness (U.K. [45]; China [46]), and higher research self-efficacy to be related to greater research productivity (e.g., Australia [31,37,47]; U.S. [28,48]). However, beyond recent cross-sectional studies exploring relations between faculty self-efficacy and emotional well-being variables (teaching-related emotions [46]; perceived stress [49]), research on how self-efficacy intersects with psychological health in post-secondary faculty internationally is currently lacking.

Self-regulation in faculty: Procrastination behaviors In addition to the role of self-efficacy beliefs in faculty development, research has also begun to explore the utility of higher-order self-regulation constructs to account for faculty performance and well-being outcomes. Nevertheless, despite a voluminous literature with students on the academic implications of self-regulation strategies [50], self-regulation among post-secondary educators with respect to teaching and research [51] or corresponding emotions (e.g., emotional labor [52]; humor coping [15]) has rarely been examined. However, notable exceptions to this research gap include scattered studies assessing self-regulation failure in post-secondary faculty with respect to global beliefs in one’s inability to cope [1,5], and an emerging body of research on faculty procrastination. More specifically, following from studies that examined how faculty perceive student procrastination [53–54], or how their instructional methods could impact student procrastination [55], limited research has also investigated the characteristics and correlates of academic procrastination behaviors in post-secondary faculty [16–17]. Procrastination is commonly defined as a dysfunctional phenomenon whereby individuals needlessly delay a task or an action despite expected negative consequences [56,57], with this behavior typically characterized as a failure of self-regulation toward a desired goal [57–61]. More specifically, procrastination researchers suggest that this maladaptive behavior can represent self-regulation failure in two ways: underregulation and/or misregulation. Whereas the underregulation hypothesis asserts that procrastination can result from poor behavioral or motivational self-regulation (e.g., ineffective work strategies, insufficient self-control or persistence [57,59,62–63]), the misregulation hypothesis proposes that individuals may instead prioritize downregulating negative emotions (e.g., anxiety) through procrastination over accomplishing an achievement goal [58,64–66]. Accordingly, findings in academic contexts have consistently found higher levels of procrastination in students to correspond with poorer performance [67–69] and self-efficacy levels [70–71], as well as lower levels of emotional well-being [72–74]. Limited existing research on procrastination in post-secondary faculty similarly suggests that this behavior is not only regularly experienced but may also correspond with maladaptive performance and psychological outcomes. Early findings showed new faculty in the U.S. to report frequently procrastinating on scholarly writing tasks (e.g., research manuscripts) and unintentionally delaying writing activities due to busyness with other academic responsibilities [17]. These descriptive results were followed up by findings showing a structured intervention that addressed binge writing to improve writing productivity in faculty who reported scholarly writing as a challenge [17,75]. Research by Ackerman and Gross [16] further delineated the specific task components that elicit procrastination in academic staff, with an online survey of faculty across the U.S. showing procrastination to be most frequent when tasks were perceived as ambiguous, difficult, or in conflict with competing deadlines. Most recently, findings from Sharma and Kaur [49] with female college and university lecturers in India showed occupational self-efficacy and procrastination behaviors to be strongly interrelated (r = -.67), with both variables further demonstrating significant correlations of equivalent magnitude with occupational stress (self-efficacy: r = -.58; procrastination: r = .62). Thus, despite emerging research highlighting the potential complementary utility of academic procrastination for predicting faculty development outcomes, in addition to more commonly assessed motivational beliefs, empirical research on procrastination in relation to academic competencies and psychological well-being in faculty members is unfortunately scarce.