Work Climate
Having discussed the different work cultures based on the type of collaboration, we now turn to the work climate. The work climate is a further sub-concept of the holistic term research culture and points more strongly in the direction of possible work outcomes. The characteristics surveyed provide clues as to whether the research cultures appear cooperative, productive, inspiring or overstraining.
Overall, a positive picture of work in academia is painted: the work climate is almost universally perceived as productive, cooperative, and mostly inspiring (see Figure 28). At the same time, however, 48% of scientists and academics feel “partly” overstrained, a further 13% even “mostly” and almost 5% “fully” overstrained. There may also be difficulties in those research contexts that are viewed as “not at all” or only “partly” productive (28.4%), cooperative (22.8%), or inspiring (40.6%) (see Figure 28).
At the level of status groups, there are clear differences in the assessment of the work climate (see Figure 29). For all dimensions, the ratings improve with increasing status. For example, professors are much more likely to report a cooperative (91%), inspiring (82%), and productive (85%) environment than postdocs (75% / 57% / 69%) and especially than predocs (74% / 54% / 70%) (see Figure 29). By contrast, only 9% of professors consider the work climate to be overstraining. This is far more common among postdocs (16%) and even more so among predocs (23%). Such differences reflect not only the role of the respective individuals in the working groups and knowledge production processes, but also socialisation, selection and self-selection processes.
There are hardly any noteworthy differences between the subject groups (see Figure 30). Only in the humanities is the working environment perceived as somewhat less cooperative and productive, but also as somewhat more inspiring than in the other subject groups. Working environments in the life sciences and especially in the engineering sciences are more often perceived as overstraining than average. Almost 22% of respondents in these fields indicated this (see Figure 30).
The concepts of work culture and work climate cannot be attributed to subject group differences, but rather run across them. This means that they represent partial aspects of research cultures that cannot be explained by disciplinary or epistemic differences between subject groups alone.