For the Sustainable Development of Universities: Exploring the External Factors Impacting Returned Early Career Academic’s Research Performance in China

Abstract

Early career academics are the key agents for the sustainable development of higher education institutions. In China, those who were educated overseas and have returned to Chinese universities to seek academic positions are becoming a fast-growing group. Good research performance is critical to survive in the increasingly competitive environment in academia. Improving research performance requires an understanding of the factors that facilitate or inhibit research performance. In the light of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this study, using a mixed-method design (20 interviewees and 136 respondents), elaborates on a number of external factors affecting returned early career academics’ research performance. Understanding these factors is helpful for the building of a favorable environment that can improve the research performance of the returned early career academics, and hence the sustainable development of universities.

Analysis of Academic Cooperation Network for Returnee Faculty Members to Realize Value from the Perspective of Economics

“…In terms of the recruiting policy, scholars mostly use methods such as text analysis, in-depth interview, and questionnaire survey to summarize the common characteristics of the recruiting policy for returnees and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the recruiting policy [10]. It shows that the recruiting policy has more commonness and less individuality, generally attaching more importance to material conditions than working environment, and has problems of mismatch [11,35].…”

Postgraduate Competence and Academic Research Performance: The Mediating Role of Psychological Capital

“…In light of this, among the most pressing concerns today in the field of higher education research is how to gain greater insight into the phenomenon of postgraduate academic research, of which academic research performance is a fundamental variable [8,9]. Academic research performance suggests the students' academic achievements and related learning outcomes and reflects their learning motivation as well as active engagement in academic research [10,11]. There is also evidence suggesting that academic research performance is associated with various sets of technological innovation and sustainable development in society [12,13].…”

Supervisory styles and graduate student innovation performance: The mediating role of psychological capital and the moderating role of harmonious academic passion

“…As a core attribute of graduate students, innovation is particularly important to reach innovative research achievements. Performance represents the output that is made visible and known to others ( Zhao et al, 2021b ). When examining the process holistically, innovation performance is defined as a construct comprising an innovation process that is similar to innovative research behavior ( Janssen, 2000 ) and an innovation outcome that is similar to academic research output ( Guo et al, 2021 ).…”