Impact - intrinsic or bust?

I'm doing some work around impact at present, so this interested me:

Research University STEM Faculty Members’ Motivation to Engage in Teaching Professional Development: Building the Choir Through an Appeal to Extrinsic Motivation and Ego. JSET doi: 10.1007/s10956-011-9346-8
This paper reports on a qualitative, grounded-theory-based study that explored the motivations of science and engineering faculty to engage in teaching professional development at a major research university. Faculty members were motivated to engage in teaching professional development due to extrinsic motivations, mainly a weakened professional ego, and sought to bring their teaching identities in better concordance with their researcher identities. The results pose a challenge to a body of research that has concluded that faculty must be intrinsically motivated to participate in teaching professional development. Results confirmed a pre-espoused theory of motivation, self-determination theory; a discussion of research literature consideration during grounded theory research is offered. A framework for motivating more faculty members at research universities to engage in teaching professional development is provided.

Comment: It's not clear to me that this provides a way forward.

Mind you, not everyone's that keen on impact: The impact agenda rewards unoriginal thinkers and threatens to snuff out the bright 'Sparks' who could change the world

Tweet