2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

We conducted semi-structured interviews of 13 men and 18 women faculty in engineering, math, and physics (pSTEM) to explore their thoughts and feelings about their experiences in the academic workplace. Interview transcripts were deductively and thematically coded according to psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These three basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness were defined from basic psychological needs theory (BPNT), a sub-theory of self-determination theory (SDT). Consistent with previous studies, participants referred to relatedness needs far more frequently than to autonomy and competence needs. To explore the nuances of how all three needs were expressed, a second phase of coding was used to inductively code subthemes within each type of need.

Within relatedness needs, faculty spoke about their collaborations, their connectedness with colleagues and other members of their academic community, and the presence or absence of mentors and related support. Satisfaction of needs for collaboration was far more prevalent among the perspectives of interviewees than connectedness and mentorship support, but these three subthemes were evenly distributed when participants spoke about the frustration of relatedness needs.

In contrast to relatedness needs, needs for autonomy were least frequently mentioned by interview participants. Autonomy refers to an individual's need to have control over their own career pathway including the freedom to choose and the resources to accomplish work consistent with the career pathway as well as the freedom from undue work stress and pressure. Freedom to pursue one’s passions and interests was, not surprisingly, the topmost frequent subtheme among autonomy needs.

Like autonomy needs, interview participants rarely mentioned the satisfaction of or frustration of competence needs. Competence needs at work are fulfilled when an individual receives encouraging feedback and guidance from coworkers and supervisors and has opportunities to do work which is neither boring nor prohibitively challenging. Among comments regarding these three subthemes of competence needs, no single subtheme emerged as dominant.

As a whole, interview participants in this study spoke extensively about all three needs, with an average of over 18 distinct references to these needs per interview. While the thematic analysis of autonomy, competence, and relatedness revealed similar results to previous studies, nuances of how these needs are met or frustrated in the workplace emerged in the sub-theme analysis. These sub-themes are important for developing targeted workplace instruments (e.g., survey scales) that relate directly to potential interventions for better meeting workplace needs in the academe.