The Hidden Cost of Being "Good": Rethinking Academic Excellence and Early Career Researcher Wellbeing

Listen to this article:

Abstract: Early career researchers (ECRs) navigate increasingly precarious academic landscapes where professional legitimacy demands extraordinary personal sacrifice. This article examines the toxic culture of overwork that pervades contemporary academia, using autoethnographic reflection and empirical evidence to illuminate how institutional pressures, performance metrics, and implicit norms compel ECRs to prioritize productivity over wellbeing. Drawing on organizational psychology, labor studies, and higher education research, the analysis reveals how the pursuit of being perceived as a "good" academic—characterized by relentless availability, excessive output, and self-exploitation—produces measurable harm to individual health and organizational effectiveness. The article synthesizes evidence-based interventions spanning transparent communication, structural reform, mentorship redesign, and workload governance, while proposing long-term strategies for psychological contract recalibration, distributed leadership, and purpose-driven academic identity formation. The analysis concludes that sustainable academic cultures require fundamental rethinking of excellence beyond productivity metrics.

The sterile lighting of the medical procedure room cast sharp shadows as my phone vibrated. A journal editor needed final revisions—minor ones, they assured me—for a manuscript that had been under review for eighteen months. Without hesitation, I typed my response confirming I would deliver within the week, all while a nurse prepared equipment for the procedure about to begin. That moment crystallized a troubling reality: I had internalized academic expectations so completely that professional responsiveness superseded basic self-preservation.

This incident is neither exceptional nor particularly dramatic by contemporary academic standards. ECRs routinely work through illness, sacrifice personal relationships, and defer life milestones in pursuit of perceived professional legitimacy (Sang et al., 2020). The normalization of such behavior reflects deeper structural pathologies within academic culture—systems that equate overwork with commitment, visibility with value, and constant availability with seriousness of scholarly purpose.

The stakes have never been higher. Academic labor markets have grown increasingly precarious, with tenure-track positions declining while contingent appointments proliferate (Kezar & DePaola, 2020). ECRs face intensifying publication demands, grant pressures, and teaching loads while navigating ambiguous career pathways (Woolston, 2019). Meanwhile, mental health challenges among academics have reached crisis proportions, with depression and anxiety rates significantly exceeding general population benchmarks (Guthrie et al., 2017).

Yet beneath these documented pressures lies a more insidious dynamic: the implicit construction of "good" academics as those who demonstrate unlimited availability, uncomplaining resilience, and productivity that transcends human limitations. This article interrogates that construction, examining how institutional structures, cultural norms, and individual internalization converge to create unsustainable work patterns. More importantly, it synthesizes evidence-based strategies for reimagining academic excellence in ways that honor both scholarly rigor and human dignity.

The Early Career Academic Landscape

Defining Early Career Researchers in Contemporary Academia

The ECR designation typically encompasses individuals from doctoral completion through the first 5-10 years post-PhD, though definitions vary across disciplines and national contexts (Bazeley, 2003). This career phase represents a particularly vulnerable period characterized by simultaneous pressures: establishing research trajectories, building teaching portfolios, developing professional networks, and securing permanent positions—all while navigating uncertain employment conditions.

Contemporary ECRs inherit an academic ecosystem transformed by neoliberal restructuring. Universities increasingly operate according to corporate management logics, with faculty productivity measured through quantifiable metrics: publication counts, citation indices, grant income, student evaluations (Kalfa et al., 2018). These metrics create what Shore and Wright (2015) term "audit cultures"—institutional environments where surveillance, measurement, and ranking become primary governance mechanisms, fundamentally reshaping academic subjectivities and work practices.

The psychological contract between ECRs and institutions has shifted dramatically. Historically, academics accepted lower salaries and limited initial autonomy in exchange for eventual job security, intellectual freedom, and community belonging (Tytherleigh et al., 2005). Today's ECRs face fundamentally different terms: extended probationary periods, heightened productivity expectations, and diminished security prospects, yet the cultural rhetoric of academic "calling" and intrinsic rewards persists, obscuring these material degradations.

State of Practice: Precarity, Productivity, and Performance

The academic labor market reveals stark realities. In the United States, tenure-track positions represented only 23.7% of instructional staff by 2016, down from over 50% in the 1970s (American Association of University Professors, 2018). Similar patterns appear globally, with fixed-term contracts and casualization becoming normative (Herschberg et al., 2018).

This precarity intersects with escalating productivity demands. Publication requirements for early career advancement have intensified substantially, with expectations often doubling or tripling compared to previous generations (Siebert et al., 2017). Grant acquisition pressures similarly intensify, particularly in STEM fields where external funding increasingly determines career viability (Müller, 2014).

Conference attendance, another dimension of academic performance, creates additional strains. ECRs often self-fund travel to maintain disciplinary visibility, navigating financial pressures alongside physical exhaustion from intensive networking schedules (Henderson, 2015). The imperative to establish international profiles compounds these challenges, particularly for researchers with caregiving responsibilities or limited institutional support.

Mentorship availability represents another critical variable. While quality mentorship significantly predicts ECR success and wellbeing (van der Weijden et al., 2015), access remains highly uneven. Women, researchers of color, and those at under-resourced institutions often report inadequate mentorship, experiencing what Thomas et al. (2007) identify as "invisible taxation"—disproportionate service burdens and unsupported navigation of institutional politics that compound existing disadvantages.

Organizational and Individual Consequences of Academic Overwork Culture

Organizational Performance Impacts

Academic institutions increasingly recognize that ECR burnout produces measurable organizational costs, though responses remain inadequate. Faculty turnover, particularly among promising early career scholars, represents significant institutional investment loss. Recruitment, onboarding, and initial professional development for a single faculty member can exceed $100,000, yet replacement becomes necessary when workplace conditions prove unsustainable (Xu, 2008).

Research productivity itself suffers under extreme pressure conditions. While moderate challenge enhances performance, chronic stress impairs cognitive function, creativity, and collaborative capacity—precisely the capabilities academic work demands (Kinman & Wray, 2013). Institutions pursuing relentless productivity metrics may paradoxically undermine the innovation they seek to cultivate.

Publication quality concerns emerge alongside quantity pressures. Pressler and Kenward (2018) document how publish-or-perish cultures incentivize fragmented publication strategies, incremental contributions, and shortened peer review timelines—patterns that may increase output counts while diminishing scholarly substance. Several research institutions have begun recognizing these tensions, with some European universities explicitly limiting the number of publications considered in evaluation processes to encourage depth over breadth.

Institutional reputation suffers when faculty wellbeing collapses publicly. When prominent ECRs depart academia citing toxic cultures, or when mental health crises become visible, universities face reputational damage that affects recruitment, donor relations, and competitive positioning (Flaherty, 2020). Yet the distributed nature of these costs often prevents institutions from recognizing the cumulative impact of unsustainable work cultures.

Individual Wellbeing and Career Impacts

The physical health consequences of academic overwork manifest across multiple dimensions. Cardiovascular problems, chronic pain conditions, sleep disorders, and immune dysfunction appear at elevated rates among academics experiencing chronic work stress (Kinman & Jones, 2008). For ECRs, these physical manifestations often begin during doctoral training and intensify during early career phases when productivity pressures peak.

Mental health impacts prove even more pervasive. A landmark Nature Biotechnology survey found that 36% of doctoral students and ECRs met criteria for moderate to severe depression, with anxiety disorders similarly elevated (Evans et al., 2018). The isolation of early career academic work, combined with constant performance evaluation and precarious employment, creates conditions conducive to psychological distress.

Imposter phenomenon—persistent self-doubt despite objective success—affects academics at disproportionate rates, with ECRs particularly vulnerable (Parkman, 2016). The syndrome intensifies in competitive academic environments where individual achievement dominates cultural narratives, leaving many ECRs feeling fraudulent despite genuine accomplishments. This psychological pattern intersects destructively with overwork tendencies, as individuals attempt to compensate for perceived inadequacy through ever-increasing effort.

Relationship consequences extend beyond the workplace. Academic career demands frequently conflict with partnership formation, maintenance, and family planning (Mason et al., 2013). The temporal misalignment between tenure clocks and biological clocks creates particular pressures for women academics, while partnership and caregiving responsibilities generally affect career progression more severely for women than men (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012).

Career sustainability questions loom large. Increasing numbers of talented ECRs exit academia not from intellectual disengagement but from recognition that the personal costs exceed sustainable limits (Shen, 2020). These departures represent substantial disciplinary losses—individuals with specialized training and demonstrated capability whose expertise exits academic ecosystems entirely because institutional cultures fail to accommodate human limitations.

Evidence-Based Organizational Responses

Transparent Communication and Expectation Clarification

Research consistently demonstrates that ambiguity regarding evaluation criteria and advancement pathways increases ECR stress and reduces performance (Rice et al., 2020). When institutions fail to articulate clear expectations, ECRs often respond by attempting to exceed all possible standards simultaneously—publishing prolifically, teaching extensively, serving on committees, attending conferences, maintaining grants—creating unsustainable workload accumulation.

Effective transparency interventions include:

• Explicit rubrics for tenure and promotion decisions that quantify publication expectations, teaching standards, and service contributions, reducing the "moving target" phenomenon many ECRs describe

• Annual workload planning conversations between ECRs and department leadership that allocate responsibilities across research, teaching, and service domains with documented agreements

• Multi-year performance roadmaps co-created between early career faculty and mentors, establishing realistic progression trajectories rather than annual crisis cycles

• Public commitment to evaluation criteria weighting where institutions specify relative importance of research, teaching, and service rather than implying all domains require excellence simultaneously

• Regular calibration meetings among evaluators to ensure consistent standards application and reduce individual bias in performance assessment

The University of British Columbia's Faculty of Arts implemented structured expectation-setting protocols requiring departments to provide written guidance on publication thresholds, teaching loads, and service expectations within ECRs' first month (University of British Columbia, 2019). Early evaluation data suggested reduced anxiety among new faculty and more strategic work prioritization, though longitudinal retention data remain pending.

Procedural Justice in Evaluation Systems

Organizational justice research identifies procedural fairness—perceptions that evaluation processes are equitable, consistent, and inclusive—as a critical determinant of employee wellbeing and organizational commitment (Greenberg, 2011). Academic evaluation systems frequently violate procedural justice principles through opaque decision-making, inconsistent criteria application, and limited opportunities for ECR voice in processes that determine career futures.

Enhancing procedural justice requires:

• Structured peer review processes for teaching evaluation that extend beyond student ratings to include peer observation, curriculum design assessment, and pedagogical innovation recognition

• Multi-source feedback systems for research evaluation incorporating external reviewers, cross-disciplinary perspectives, and qualitative impact assessment beyond citation metrics

• Explicit bias reduction protocols in evaluation committees, including implicit bias training, structured evaluation rubrics, and diversity representation requirements

• Appeals mechanisms that provide genuine recourse when ECRs believe evaluation processes violated established procedures or applied inconsistent standards

• Documentation transparency ensuring ECRs receive detailed written feedback explaining evaluation outcomes with specific evidence and improvement pathways

The Australian National University established a structured appeals process for probation and promotion decisions that requires evaluative committees to provide detailed written justifications for negative decisions, with independent review available when ECRs identify procedural violations (Australian National University, 2020). Implementation correlated with increased ECR satisfaction regarding evaluation fairness, even among those receiving critical feedback, suggesting process legitimacy matters independently of outcomes.

Capability Building Through Structured Development Programs

Individual capability development represents a productive intervention domain, though it risks problematically positioning ECR wellbeing as an individual rather than structural responsibility. Nonetheless, evidence supports targeted skill-building in areas where ECRs report confidence gaps that contribute to stress and overwork patterns.

Effective development interventions include:

• Time management and priority-setting workshops specifically designed for academic work patterns, addressing unique challenges like manuscript revision timelines, grant cycles, and semester rhythms

• Boundary-setting and refusal skills training that provides practical language and strategies for declining excessive requests without career damage

• Publication strategy development helping ECRs distinguish high-impact publication opportunities from marginal commitments that consume time disproportionate to career benefit

• Networking efficiency techniques that maximize professional connection benefits while minimizing time investment and emotional exhaustion

• Stress management and resilience programming offering evidence-based approaches to maintaining wellbeing under demanding conditions

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Office of Graduate Education developed a comprehensive professional development curriculum for postdoctoral researchers—a critical ECR population—that combines practical skill workshops with peer support structures (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2021). Participant outcomes included improved time management self-efficacy and reduced feelings of isolation, though publication productivity effects remained inconclusive.

Operating Model Reforms and Workload Controls

Structural interventions addressing workload distribution and operating model design prove most impactful for sustainable culture change, though they require institutional commitment beyond individual department initiatives. These reforms acknowledge that individual ECR wellbeing cannot be meaningfully addressed without confronting systemic work organization problems.

Critical operating model interventions include:

• Teaching load reduction during early career years that provides protected research time without penalizing teaching-focused colleagues or exploiting contingent labor

• Grant proposal support infrastructure including professional grant writers, budget specialists, and administrative assistance that reduces ECR time spent on non-intellectual grant labor

• Collaborative hiring models that build cohorts of ECRs entering simultaneously, creating peer support networks and distributing service responsibilities across groups rather than individuals

• Research leave policies guaranteeing sabbatical or research-intensive semesters within the first five years, preventing the cumulative exhaustion that extended uninterrupted teaching creates

• Service work redistribution that protects ECRs from excessive committee assignments while ensuring departmental governance functions continue

The University of Melbourne introduced a "research-intensive semester" program guaranteeing all early career faculty a semester with reduced teaching load within their first three years, supported by centrally funded teaching replacements rather than departmental budget reallocation (University of Melbourne, 2018). Participating ECRs reported substantial research productivity gains and reduced stress, with the program becoming institutionally embedded after initial pilot success.

Financial and Benefit Supports Addressing Material Precarity

Material insecurity—inadequate salary, benefits gaps, and career uncertainty—underlies much ECR stress, yet interventions in this domain receive insufficient attention relative to productivity and culture discussions. Addressing financial precarity requires acknowledging that passion for scholarship cannot substitute for living wages and basic security.

Financial security interventions include:

• Minimum salary standards for early career positions that reflect living costs in institutional geographic contexts and recognize credentialed expertise

• Conference travel funding that eliminates expectation ECRs self-fund professional development essential for career advancement

• Research startup packages providing genuine resource access rather than symbolic gestures, with funds available for equipment, research assistance, and project development

• Health insurance and benefits equity ensuring contingent and early career faculty receive comparable coverage to established colleagues

• Parental leave policies offering paid time and reentry support that acknowledges caregiving as compatible with academic excellence rather than career impediment

Stanford University expanded parental leave policies to include all postdoctoral scholars regardless of funding source, standardizing benefits previously dependent on individual grant provisions (Stanford University, 2017). The policy acknowledged that ECR family formation decisions were being distorted by benefit availability rather than personal preference, with implementation correlating with improved postdoctoral recruitment and retention.

Building Long-Term Cultural Sustainability and Institutional Resilience

Psychological Contract Recalibration: Redefining the "Good" Academic

The concept of the psychological contract—unwritten expectations governing employment relationships—provides a productive framework for understanding academic culture transformation needs (Rousseau, 1995). Traditional academic psychological contracts emphasized autonomy, intellectual freedom, and eventual security in exchange for flexibility, modest compensation, and professional dedication. Contemporary realities have violated these implicit agreements, yet cultural expectations persist as though contracts remained intact.

Recalibrating psychological contracts requires explicit institutional work across several dimensions. First, institutions must acknowledge contract violations honestly rather than maintaining fictions about academic privilege and flexibility that no longer align with lived experience (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). This acknowledgment creates foundation for renegotiating realistic terms.

Second, performance expectations must align with available resources and structural support. When institutions demand research productivity equivalent to R1 universities while providing teaching loads, administrative burdens, and resource access resembling comprehensive institutions, they create impossible contradictions that guarantee ECR failure or exhaustion (O'Meara et al., 2017).

Third, redefining "good" academics requires expanding legitimacy beyond productivity metrics to encompass diverse contributions. Valuing pedagogical innovation, public engagement, mentorship quality, collaborative capacity, and community building alongside traditional research output creates space for sustainable excellence (Macfarlane & Burg, 2019). This expansion must extend beyond rhetoric to material evaluation processes, promotion criteria, and resource allocation.

Fourth, institutional messaging must cease valorizing overwork and self-sacrifice as markers of commitment. When leadership celebrates faculty who work through illness, maintain constant availability, or sacrifice personal wellbeing, they communicate that sustainable work practices represent insufficient dedication. Conversely, visibly modeling boundary-setting, celebrating rest, and acknowledging human limitations sends powerful counter-messages.

Distributed Leadership Structures and Power-Sharing

Hierarchical academic governance structures often concentrate decision-making power among established faculty while marginalizing ECR voices in policy development affecting their working conditions (Bolden et al., 2012). This exclusion perpetuates cultures optimized for career stages and life circumstances that no longer characterize the contemporary ECR experience.

Distributed leadership approaches involve:

Formal ECR representation in governance structures with genuine authority rather than token consultation, including curriculum committees, hiring decisions, strategic planning bodies, and resource allocation processes. Many ECRs possess valuable perspectives on emerging disciplinary directions, pedagogical innovation, and early career support needs that senior colleagues may lack.

Mentorship reciprocity frameworks recognizing that knowledge and skill transfer operate multidirectionally. Junior colleagues often bring technological competencies, methodological innovations, and contemporary theoretical frameworks that benefit established scholars, while senior faculty provide institutional navigation expertise and professional networks. Framing these relationships as reciprocal rather than unidirectional reduces status hierarchies that silence ECR voices.

Rotating leadership responsibilities that distribute service work more equitably while providing ECRs with governance experience and visibility. Rather than concentrating administrative roles among senior faculty or overburdening specific individuals, rotation models spread responsibilities across career stages and prevent the "service gap" where ECRs simultaneously carry excessive informal burdens while lacking formal leadership opportunities.

Flat team structures in research groups that minimize hierarchical dynamics and create space for collaborative knowledge production. Principal investigator models that operate more as coordination roles than authoritative positions foster environments where diverse contributions receive recognition and ECRs develop scholarly identities beyond subordinate positions.

Purpose, Belonging, and Identity Formation Beyond Productivity

Academic identity formation research reveals that sustainable scholarly careers require sense of purpose and community belonging that extends beyond publication counts and metric achievements (Ylijoki & Ursin, 2013). ECRs who develop intrinsic motivation, intellectual community connections, and clear understanding of their scholarship's significance demonstrate greater resilience and career satisfaction than those oriented primarily toward external validation and productivity metrics.

Fostering purpose-driven academic identity involves:

Intellectual community cultivation through reading groups, works-in-progress seminars, collaborative writing initiatives, and informal scholarly exchange that prioritize idea development over output production. These communities provide intrinsic rewards—engaging conversation, intellectual stimulation, collegial support—that sustain motivation when external pressures intensify.

Values clarification processes helping ECRs articulate their core scholarly commitments and align work choices with those values. Rather than reactive responses to every opportunity or demand, values-driven decision-making enables strategic prioritization and clearer boundaries around activities that advance meaningful goals versus those that simply accumulate on vitae.

Impact beyond metrics by emphasizing scholarship's substantive contributions to knowledge, practice, or social good rather than exclusively focusing on journal prestige or citation counts. ECRs who maintain connection to why their research matters—which problems it addresses, which communities it serves, which understandings it advances—demonstrate greater persistence and satisfaction (Laudel & Gläser, 2008).

Inclusive excellence frameworks that recognize diverse pathways to scholarly contribution and resist singular models of academic success. Excellence can manifest through innovative pedagogy, community-engaged research, interdisciplinary collaboration, methodological development, or theoretical synthesis, not only through traditional publication hierarchies. Institutions that genuinely embrace multiple excellence forms create space for diverse ECR strengths and sustainable contribution patterns.

Narrative identity development through reflective practice, mentorship conversations, and professional development activities that help ECRs construct coherent stories about their scholarly trajectories, setbacks, and achievements. Narrative coherence provides resilience during challenging periods by situating temporary difficulties within larger meaningful arcs rather than interpreting every obstacle as career-ending failure (McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011).

Conclusion

The sterile medical room incident that opened this analysis represents more than individual poor judgment—it exemplifies systemic failure. Academic cultures that produce such moments, where professional responsiveness supersedes basic self-preservation, require fundamental transformation rather than marginal adjustment.

The evidence synthesized throughout this article demonstrates that ECR wellbeing and sustainable academic cultures are not competing values requiring balance but mutually reinforcing imperatives. Institutions that invest in transparent communication, procedural justice, workload governance, material security, and distributed leadership do not sacrifice excellence—they create conditions in which genuine intellectual rigor and innovation flourish. Conversely, cultures that valorize overwork, normalize precarity, and measure worth exclusively through productivity metrics ultimately undermine both human dignity and scholarly quality.

Meaningful change requires interventions across multiple levels. Individual ECRs benefit from capability development, boundary-setting skills, and support networks, though we must reject frameworks that position wellbeing as individual responsibility divorced from structural conditions. Departments and institutions must implement operating model reforms, evaluation system redesign, and resource allocation aligned with stated values. Disciplinary communities must interrogate publication cultures, conference norms, and implicit status hierarchies that reward unsustainable work patterns.

Most fundamentally, we must reclaim "good academic" from toxic constructions that equate it with unlimited availability and self-exploitation. Good academics can maintain boundaries. Good academics can prioritize wellbeing. Good academics can say no. Good academics can be fully human while producing rigorous scholarship—indeed, sustainable excellence requires nothing less.

The transformation will not happen quickly or easily. Academic cultures accumulate over decades and centuries, embedding assumptions about work, worth, and scholarly life deep in institutional structures and individual identities. Yet change becomes possible when communities collectively name dysfunction, envision alternatives, and implement evidence-based reforms. ECRs should not have to respond to emails during medical procedures, work through illness, or sacrifice relationships to be perceived as sufficiently committed. Creating academic cultures where such moments become unthinkable rather than normal represents the essential work before us.

References

1. American Association of University Professors. (2018). Data snapshot: Contingent faculty in US higher ed. AAUP.

2. Australian National University. (2020). Academic promotion and probation procedures. ANU Academic Board.

3. Bazeley, P. (2003). Defining 'early career' in research. Higher Education, 45(3), 257–279.

4. Bolden, R., Petrov, G., & Gosling, J. (2012). Distributed leadership in higher education: Rhetoric and reality. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 40(2), 159–177.

5. Evans, T. M., Bira, L., Gastelum, J. B., Weiss, L. T., & Vanderford, N. L. (2018). Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education. Nature Biotechnology, 36(3), 282–284.

6. Flaherty, C. (2020). Mental health crisis for grad students. Inside Higher Ed.

7. Greenberg, J. (2011). Organizational justice: The dynamics of fairness in the workplace. In S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (Vol. 3, pp. 271–327). American Psychological Association.

8. Guthrie, S., Lichten, C. A., Van Belle, J., Ball, S., Knack, A., & Hofman, J. (2017). Understanding mental health in the research environment. RAND Corporation.

9. Henderson, E. F. (2015). Academic conferences: Representative and resistant sites for higher education research. Higher Education Research & Development, 34(5), 914–925.

10. Herschberg, C., Benschop, Y., & van den Brink, M. (2018). Precarious postdocs: A comparative study on recruitment and selection of early-career researchers. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 34(4), 303–310.

11. Kalfa, S., Wilkinson, A., & Gollan, P. J. (2018). The academic game: Compliance and resistance in universities. Work, Employment and Society, 32(2), 274–291.

12. Kezar, A., & DePaola, T. (2020). The American Faculty Survey: 2020. Pullias Center for Higher Education, University of Southern California.

13. Kinman, G., & Jones, F. (2008). A life beyond work? Job demands, work-life balance, and wellbeing in UK academics. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 17(1–2), 41–60.

14. Kinman, G., & Wray, S. (2013). Higher stress: A survey of stress and well-being among staff in higher education. University and College Union.

15. Laudel, G., & Gläser, J. (2008). From apprentice to colleague: The metamorphosis of early career researchers. Higher Education, 55(3), 387–406.

16. Macfarlane, B., & Burg, D. (2019). Women professors and the academic housework trap. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 41(3), 262–274.

17. Mason, M. A., Wolfinger, N. H., & Goulden, M. (2013). Do babies matter? Gender and family in the ivory tower. Rutgers University Press.

18. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (2021). Postdoctoral professional development. MIT Office of Graduate Education.

19. McAlpine, L., & Amundsen, C. (2011). To be or not to be? The challenges of learning academic work. Teaching in Higher Education, 16(2), 203–215.

20. Müller, R. (2014). Racing for what? Anticipation and acceleration in the work and career practices of academic life science postdocs. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 15(3), Article 15.

21. O'Meara, K., Kuvaeva, A., Nyunt, G., Waugaman, C., & Jackson, R. (2017). Asked more often: Gender differences in faculty workload in research universities and the work interactions that shape them. American Educational Research Journal, 54(6), 1154–1186.

22. Parkman, A. (2016). The imposter phenomenon in higher education: Incidence and impact. Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 16(1), 51–60.

23. Pressler, N., & Kenward, K. (2018). Indicators of a toxic scholarly publication environment. Workplace Health & Safety, 66(1), 1–3.

24. Rice, S., Winter, S. R., Doherty, S., & Milner, M. (2020). Advantages and disadvantages of using internet-based survey methods in aviation-related research. Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering, 7(1), 58–65.

25. Rousseau, D. M. (1995). Psychological contracts in organizations: Understanding written and unwritten agreements. SAGE Publications.

26. Sang, K., Powell, A., Finkel, R., & Richards, J. (2020). 'Being an academic is not a 9–5 job': Long working hours and the 'ideal worker' in UK academia. Labour & Industry, 30(3), 195–216.

27. Shen, H. (2020). Inequality quantified: Mind the gender gap. Nature, 576(7787), 327–329.

28. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2015). Governing by numbers: Audit culture, rankings and the new world order. Social Anthropology, 23(1), 22–28.

29. Siebert, S., Martin, G., Bozic, B., & Docherty, I. (2017). Looking 'beyond the factory gates': Towards more pluralist and radical approaches to intra-organizational trust research. Organization Studies, 38(11), 1033–1062.

30. Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

31. Stanford University. (2017). Postdoctoral parental leave policy. Stanford Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.

32. Thomas, G. D., Hollenshead, C., & Reskin, B. (2007). Visibility and professional standing among women academic scientists and engineers. University of Michigan.

33. Tytherleigh, M. Y., Webb, C., Cooper, C. L., & Ricketts, C. (2005). Occupational stress in UK higher education institutions: A comparative study of all staff categories. Higher Education Research & Development, 24(1), 41–61.

34. University of British Columbia. (2019). Faculty onboarding and expectation-setting protocols. UBC Faculty of Arts.

35. University of Melbourne. (2018). Research-intensive semester program evaluation. University of Melbourne Academic Board.

36. van der Weijden, I., Teelken, C., de Boer, M., & Drost, M. (2015). Career satisfaction of postdoctoral researchers in relation to their expectations for the future. Higher Education, 72(1), 25–40.

37. Ward, K., & Wolf-Wendel, L. (2012). Academic motherhood: How faculty manage work and family. Rutgers University Press.

38. Woolston, C. (2019). PhDs: The tortuous truth. Nature, 575(7782), 403–406.

39. Xu, Y. J. (2008). Faculty turnover: Discipline-specific attention is warranted. Research in Higher Education, 49(1), 40–61.

40. Ylijoki, O. H., & Ursin, J. (2013). The construction of academic identity in the changes of Finnish higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 38(8), 1135–1149.

---

Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Academic & Learning Officer (HCI Academy); Associate Dean and Director of HR Programs (WGU); Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD/HR/Leadership Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.

---

Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2025). The Hidden Cost of Being "Good": Rethinking Academic Excellence and Early Career Researcher Wellbeing. Human Capital Leadership Review, 28(2). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.28.2.5