An investigation of academic career success: The new tempo of academic life

Recognizing the environmental changes and challenges that have impacted academics over the past 20 years, we develop a model of academic career success from a job demands-resources perspective. We define career success in terms of salary and career satisfaction. We link work stressors (family-to-work conflict and role overload), positive career shocks, and negative career shocks to academic career success through work engagement. We test the hypothesized model controlling for a number of alternative predictors and with survey data collected from an international sample of 1,644 Academy of Management members. Results reveal that family-to-work conflict indirectly, negatively relates to career satisfaction through work engagement; role overload (negatively), directly relates to career satisfaction, and positively to salary. Several positive and negative career shocks indirectly relate to career satisfaction through work engagement, and relate directly to salary. We also explore differences by career stage and for nontenure track faculty. Our findings extend the predictors of academic career success to include various job demands (stressors and negative shocks) and resources (positive shocks), extend the generalizability of previous findings on the predictors of academic career success to academics outside the US, and empirically validate Arthur Bedeian’s advice in his essay in the Rhythms of Academic Life.