Research On The University Teachers' Implicit Incentive

University teachers, as the founder of the university values and spirits, are whom the future of the university, to a certain degree, rest upon. Nowadays, loss of the academic beliefs and weak creativity of the university teachers has become the bottleneck for universities' developments. The question of how to inspire and motivate the university teachers therefore attracts common concerns both in theory and practice. Incentive-reinforcement oriented reforms in personnel and payment system of universities are vigorously proceeding at present, where on-going reviews of their effectiveness are followed with one after another. Economics, Management Science and Psychology theories of incentives have successively joined in the discussion of the question in concern, the incentives for university teachers, from their respective viewing angles. In such discussion, institution intervention and academic freedom constitute the key pair of irreconcilable antimony. Thus, either resolving the practical problems in motivating the university teachers or advancing the current incentive theory framework is highly demanded. To meet those demands, this research commits to conduct a systematic study on the implicit incentives for the university teachers. This research paper will start from demonstrating the common natures between the specialties of incentives for the university teachers and the features in implicit incentives, and then after analyzing the feasibility as well as the necessity of using implicit incentives to motivate university teachers, it will try to construct and draw an all-round picture of the implicit incentive system for university teachers.Incentive is an activation or motivation stimulus, by which using a certain management methods, to direct, guide and maintain the institution members' behaviors to ensure their coherence with the institutional objectives. "Human being" is the object of the incentive, which in turn determines that the incentive by its nature is a "unity of value rationality and instrumental rationality". Incentive theory right from its outset is mainly focused on studying profit-making entities, e.g. corporations and enterprises, where the principle of "maximum of profit" leads the incentive toward an instrumental rationality orientation. However, the duplexity character of the incentive for university teachers makes it distinguished from that for profit-driven entities. The duplexity of the incentive is derived from two objectives normally adopted by universities: the "pursuit of the ultimate values" and the "pursuit of pragmatic material gain", among which the former should always be the primary objective of the universities, since the education entities undertake the responsibilities of promoting public welfares. The incentive should also satisfy the demands of the university teachers which composed of the "development demand" and the "survival demand". Given the "man of ideas" nature of the university teachers, the former ought to be the central demand. Furthermore, the interest correlations and conformities between the universities and the teachers require that the essential purpose of the incentive for university teachers is to stimulate teachers' inner motivations for pursuing academic achievements, and consequently two objectives of the universities could be successfully realized.The idea of the implicit incentive and the special features of the incentive for university teachers have internal common grounds. The idea of implicit incentive, from its developing process, has demonstrated the deep cognitions in the complex inner world of human beings, as well as the profound understandings on the "cooperative" character of institutions. Previous researches from the psychological contract, fame implicit incentive and flexible incentive fields could provide us solid basis when analyzing the connotations and features of the implicit incentive. The nature of the implicit incentive is a method of establishing and keeping a psychological contract which benefits to achieve the organizational objectives, between the organization and its members. Psychological contract is normally referred to as psychological, emotional and psychical expectations on the institution by the members, such as trust, acknowledgement, respect, ethic, culture and values etc. The prime features of the implicit incentive are implicitness and connotative, which generally are referred to as the hidden nature of the incentive objective, the intangibility of the incentive object, the penetrability of the incentive method and the unknown of the incentive mechanism. The "spirituality" and the "subjectivity", the two values stem from the "implicit" nature, can make the implicit incentive to exhibit its distinctive motivational power under certain conditions.From a practical point of view, the universities are able to implement implicit incentives. The desire to be an "academic scholar" of university teachers indicates that their primary demand is academic pursuance which then correlates with the "acknowledgement" and "academic freedom" demands. Not only those demands are consistent with the "spirituality" feature of the implicit incentive as abovementioned, but also the "subjectivity" feature is compatible with the virtues of the "professional academics": professional, independent and self-discipline, creative and unpredictable. In addition, the following four characteristics of the "academic institution", the internal integrity of institutional objectives, the unconsolidated unification of institutional structures, the duplexity of institution power hierarchies and the transcendency of the institutional pursuance, supply the universities rich resources and enable them to carry out implicit incentives. This is further supported by Albert Bandura's theory of reciprocal determinism among three parties: the "environment", the "cognition" and the "behavior". It can therefore be reasonably concluded that the implicit incentive is a necessary and effective measure to motivate the university teachers."Strong explicit incentive but weak implicit incentive" is the reality in Chinese universities. The current incentive mechanism, which expressly shows the profit-seeking desire of the university managers and runs in accordance with the environment of university management systems, is the result of over-strengthened bureaucratic hierarchy of the universities and the abuse of power in the university administrative systems. When the "instrumental rationalism" prevailed over the "value rationalism", the "efficiency-ism" became popular. "Freedom" was suppressed by the "control" from supreme powers and "spirit" was destroyed by "economic want". Various advert effects were caused by excessive explicit incentives: the academic bubbles, academic corruptions formed academic problems, and loss of academic beliefs, misplacement of self worthiness and health problems of the university teachers were deemed as social problems. A national survey in that regard revealed that identifying the career identity and lacking of career passion have become the two serious problems for university teachers. Taken account of the facts and situations as above mentioned, it again reinforces the necessity of increasing implicit intensive measures for university teachers.Although the importance of the implicit incentive is self-evident, it still needs time to be sufficiently implemented into both the theoretical and practical fields. Theoretically speaking, the implicit incentive should integrate the following groups: expectation and trust, culture and institutional system, obtaining acknowledgement and strengthening of self-efficacy. With respect to the practical fulfillment, the implicit incentive should then be combined by different incentives of institutional system, environment, and fame etc. The implicit incentive of institutional system can brings about the merits of ethics and acknowledgement; the environmental implicit incentive can achieves tolerance, respect, fairness; the implicit incentive of fame can promote the reputations of the universities, the academic careers and the academic scholars themselves.