Time Distribution of Professional Tasks for Academic Staff in Yarmouk University

Abstract

Time management is the key to effective administration, as time is a major determining factor in success or failure of any organization. A university, as an educational entity, is concerned with teaching and conducting scientific research in various fields of knowledge. Academic staff are considered to be a corner stone in the university educational process. For this, we need to find out the professional tasks of academic staff at Yarmouk University. The aim of this study is to answer the following questions 1. What are the faculty actual workloads as related to academic rank? 2. What are the faculty’s desired workloads as related to academic rank? 3. Are there any significant differences between faculty actual work load and faculty desired workload due to academic rank? The population of the study consists of 530 academic staff at Yarmouk University in the academic year 2000/2001, comprising all full-time professors, associate professors, assistant professors, and instructors. The sample of the study consists of 200 academic staff (37,7%) of the population. Aquestionnaire was constructed and applied for data collection. Statistical analysis has lead to the following findings and conclusions: 1. Academic staff spent an average actual time of 48,57 hours per week to carry out their workloads, and the desired average workload was 46,48 hours. 2. The actual faculty workload, appears as follows: teaching assignment ranked tops followed by reading the literature, and carrying out research successively; whereas, in the desired workload more time was considered for research, and for participation in committees and other administrative work. 3. In general, and with regard to various workload assignments taken as a whole, there were non-statistically significant differences between actual distribution of time and the desired distribution of time. 4. With regard to various types of workload assignment taken individually, there were statistically significant differences between some of them which were attributed to differences in academic rank.