Relationship Between Research and Teaching in Business Education: Synergistic, Complementary or Parasitic?

Abstract

The current relationship existing between research and teaching in contemporary Business Education in the higher education discourse is critical to the survival of quality education across the globe. Notwithstanding the different interpretations (marital status, impending divorce, holy alliance and useful link) ascribed to the relationship between research, subsequent studies have adopted several approaches to measuring these two core mandates of the individual academic and their possible integration. For the purpose of this study, research productivity and teaching effectiveness were used as proxies for gauging the relationship. Even though, several earlier studies have concentrated on espousing a clearer link between research and teaching, most of these studies have not been able to come out with this relationship in specific terms such as the relationship between faculty member’s research productivity and teaching effectiveness within the Business Education landscape. Using the stratified disproportionate sampling technique, 201 Business Education faculty members engaged from public universities in Ghana for the 2020-2021 academic year. A self-developed questionnaire was used for data collection. The questionnaires were validated through the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method. The data were analysed inferentially (i.e., regression analysis), and descriptively (i.e., means, standard deviations). In all, it was found that research productivity is a significant positive predictor of teaching effectiveness. It is therefore, recommended that as part of the university’s mechanisms for determining the teaching efficacy of faculty members, the management of universities are encouraged to incorporate research-teaching integration components into promotions and tenure-tracks by way of encouraging faculty members to promote research-based teaching. Also, faculty members should make the conscious effort to strike a balance between time devoted to teaching and time devoted for research in order to optimise the benefits derived from the perceived synergistic relationship between research and teaching.

Keywords: Research, teaching, research productivity, teaching effectiveness, research-teaching nexus, faculty members, synergistic

DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/120-14

Publication date: April 30^th 2022