Professors Around the United States Are Resigning Due to In-Person Instruction Sanctions & Lack of University Pandemic Protocols

Many institutions around the world are starting up new semesters and bringing students back to campus for in-person and hybrid teaching. While some are excited to welcome back “normalcy,” according to an Insider Higher Ed article, many professors are quitting their positions due to the lack of ability to teach remotely. In the United States alone, several professors have publicly announced that they are resigning due to face-to-face instruction sanctions, as well as the lack of standards of mask and vaccine mandates. This includes professors at the University of Alabama, University of North Georgia, Pennsylvania State University at State College, University of Tennessee, and more.

For an organization to be successful and profitable, it is crucial that it supports employees to achieve and maintain a high level of performance and well-being. Individual well-being has been shown to be an important precursor to both individual and organization performance (Ford, Cerasoli, Higgins & Decesare, 2011; Taris & Schreurs, 2009). Fundamentally, work performance is underpinned by motivation (Deci et al., 2017). Importantly, there are two types1 of motivation, extrinsic motivation which is reliant on external rewards and pressures (such as pay and deadlines), and intrinsic motivation that derives both from within the individual and the task itself (i.e. fuelled by interest; Deci, 1971). While extrinsic motivation can lead to elevated performance, especially for tasks that are easily quantifiable and for which quality is less relevant, intrinsic motivation is useful for tasks in which qualitative excellence and creativity matters (Covington & Mueller, 2001). Extrinsic motives not only shift attention away from the task to the reward (Pittman et al., 1983), but may make behaviour dependent on external-regulation and inhibit independent thought (Ryan, 1993). More recent work has highlighted that the negative effect of external rewards on intrinsically rewarding tasks may be explained by a distractor effect, which may eventually wear off in real-life settings (Reiss, 2012). In any case, given that monetary remuneration is an integral part of employment, employers are less focussed on avoiding extrinsic motivators, and seek instead to enhance intrinsic motivators. In one study Kuvaas and colleagues (2017) surveyed thousands of employees in retail, finance, and technology organizations in Norway and found that intrinsic motivation (derived from their role and associated activities) was uniformly associated with positive employee outcomes such as performance and well-being, while extrinsic motivation (monetary rewards) was found to be negatively related, or unrelated to these outcomes. So, if intrinsic motivation is so important for work performance and well-being, how can we foster it? In the next section we propose a model of how work from home arrangements might act via motivation and need satisfaction to influence performance and well-being utilising self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2017).