Predictors of job satisfaction among academic faculty members: do instructional and clinical staff differ?

Critical to the infrastructure of a strong academic medical center is the medical faculty. Attention to job satisfaction of academic medical faculty has gained national attention in part due to the current economic climate in which recruitment of faculty to replace those who leave is costly. Recent national survey data from the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) reported a staggering 38–40% attrition rate of academic medical faculty over a ten year period.1 Because faculty retention and job satisfaction are intimately linked, understanding what drives and satisfies academic medical faculty is invaluable for providing continuos and quality patient care,2 teaching the next generation of physicians, and minimizing the high cost of recruiting new faculty.3, 4 Despite being a relatively new track, the number of clinical track faculty is currently nearly comparable with the instructional track, which emphasizes the traditional tripartite missions of patient care, research and teaching.5 By contrast, the clinical track’s primary missions are in patient care and teaching (Figure 1A). This striking increase in the non-tenure clinical track faculty reflects a national trend6 and makes retention of faculty in the clinical track equally important to retention in the instructional track, so that an academic medical center can meet its responsibilities to its patients and maintain financial stability. Figure 1 Conceptual Framework for Comparing Instructional and Clinical Track Faculty Job Satisfaction Because the clinical track is structurally different from the instructional track, we sought to identify and contrast predictors of job satisfaction between the two tracks by conducting a medical school faculty survey. We designed a conceptual framework7 to illustrate the overlapping yet distinct roles of an academic faculty member, representing the track’s primary responsibilities (Figure 1A) and categorized overlapping individual, departmental and institutional characteristics previously described in the literature as influencing faculty job satisfaction (Figure 1B). Academic medical faculty surveys have been used to examine differences in job satisfaction among clinical track faculty,8 to investigate gender differences,9, 10 or all academic medical faculty,11–14 and have suggested that job satisfaction is largely related to autonomy,13 work-life balance,10, 15 departmental leadership,11 salary compensation,11, 13 and having a mentor.16, 17 Our conceptual framework is structured to reflect these findings from these previous studies, which describe characteristics that can be derived from varying hierarchical levels as well as literature supporting a strong association between job satisfaction with faculty retention.11 To our knowledge, no prior study has directly compared predictors of job satisfaction between the two faculty tracks despite the differing primary missions. We formulated the following hypotheses: (1) similar areas of job satisfaction will emerge for both faculty tracks due to overlapping missions of teaching and patient care, and (2) because of the different expectations of the instructional and clinical faculty tracks, predictors of job satisfaction will vary and different strategies will need to be proposed for each faculty track to enhance faculty satisfaction.