Relation Between Personal Management and Research Results in Physics

In this article we study the relation between personal management and research results in Physics. We postulate a hypothesis that the quality of personal management is correlated with the research results. The main motivation for this research comes from modern macroeconomic models of growth which indicate the link between technological (scientific) progress and growth of the whole economy. Thus, we believe that implementing efficient management strategies in research can improve research results and consequently contribute to the growth of the economy. In order to confirm the main hypothesis we designed a research and conducted it among physicists from all over the world. The questionnaire devised for the study consisted of two parts-in one the respondents were asked to say how much they personally agree with given sentences about management, in the other they were asked to provide two pieces of information concerning their research results for the year 2014 (number of publications and total impact factor). Since in the first part of the questionnaire we have implemented the Likert scale, it was justifiable to assign numbers to possible answers and, therefore, for each respondent on the basis of his/her answers we could calculate the score which indicated the personal management effectiveness (PME). Apparently, PME introduced in this way is a quantitative rate, which allows one to consider for a given set of results the correlation between PME and a quantity that indicates research results. To determine the research results we asked in the second part of the questionnaire about the number of articles published in 2014 (denoted NA) and the total impact factor (TIF) of those articles, which should be understood as sum of impact factors of the journals in which the respondent published his/her articles in 2014.