females (Shi and Chen 2011 ). In some highly prestigious institutions, there are
fewer female faculty members (Fang and Ling 1994 ). All these reasons above result
into the research outputs of female faculty members lower than their male peers.
6.1.3.2 Structure of Human Capital of University Research Staff
Some traits of human capital, such as education background, experience,
appointment, are also important factors impacting on university research efficiency
(Cole and Cole 1972 ; Dundar and Lewis 1998 ).
- Education Background
Level of education is highly and positively associated with one’s research
capacity. Among winners of research awards above provincial level and China
National Natural Sciences Foundation, most of whom are with PhD degrees (Yan
2008 ). Besides, university faculty with different backgrounds tend to have different
ways in thinking and working, thus the heterogeneity of education background
would bring two contradictory effects. On the one hand, the differences on edu-
cation background would provide diversifying information and deeper under-
standing on research questions, which would improve the performances of all
faculty members. On the other hand, the differences on education background might
result into disagreements between faculty members and thus lower their
performances.
A study of Mohammed and Angell ( 2004 ) supported the second point, that the
heterogeneity of education background will cause conflicts between team members,
which is not good for improving team performance. However, in another study, it’s
found that the heterogeneity of education background will bring positive impacts on
team performance, since various education backgrounds enrich the diversification
of the team, and increase the interactions between different points of view (Jehn
et al. 1999 ).
- Professional Experience
Individual’s professional experience is also an important factor to the operation
and productivity of a team. Usually, professional experience of a team member can
function as proxy measures for an individual’s position in his/her broader social
networks (Stvilia et al. 2011 ). A few studies on the research teams’productivities
used the time since some events in researcher’s professional career (e.g. obtaining
PhD) to be the measurement of seniority (Marin-Sempere et al. 2008 ). Cohen and
Zhou ( 1991 ) treated seniority as the duration of a member working in a particular
team, similar with his/her appointments. Sempere et al. ( 2008 ) found that senior
researchers usually can be found in larger research teams, and these teams tend to
perform better in research productivities. From the perspective of university fac-
ulty’s titles, full professors tend to be more productive than associate or assistant
professors (Cole and Cole 1972 ; Dundar and Lewis 1998 ). Applying Two-stage
6.1 Analytic Framework of Factors Impacting... 269