Me, myself, and my university: a multilevel analysis of individual and institutional determinants of academic performance

Academic performance is widely considered a major predictor of a university’s success. Matching individual primary data from an online questionnaire (N = 1,057 doctoral and postdoctoral junior faculty members of German business and economics faculties at 65 different universities) with secondary institutional data, we investigate and compare the influence of individual-level variables (i.e., gender, work motivation) and an organizational-level variable (i.e., involvement in the excellence initiative) on individual-level academic performance. By using hierarchical linear modeling for our data analyses, we consider interactions across individual and institutional levels and take institutional level variance into account. Our data indicate that on the individual level, women outperform male scholars and that both intrinsic and extrinsic work motivations are positively related to academic performance. On an institutional level, the involvement of business and/or economics faculties in the excellence initiative had no significant effect on academic performance. However, involvement in the excellence initiative (i.e., in graduate schools and/or clusters of excellence) moderated the relationship between extrinsic work motivation and academic performance in such a way that highly extrinsically motivated respondents employed by faculties that were involved performed significantly worse than highly extrinsically motivated respondents employed by non-involved faculties.