Salary & Academic Performance

The Problem

Tertiary institutions wanted to know if salary and research allowances improve task delivery and research output, or if other factors matter more.

Our Solution

Surveyed 355 academic staff. Ran descriptive statistics, Spearman correlations, simple linear regression (salary → task delivery), and multiple regression (salary + research allowance → research output) in Python (pandas, SciPy, statsmodels).

Impact

• Salary explained only ~9.5% of task delivery variance – significant but modest
• Research output was intrinsically motivated (near‑zero salary correlation)
• Guided institutions to invest beyond pay in research culture