NEGOTIATING MOTIVATION AND STRESS IN ACADEMIC WORK: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF LECTURER PERFORMANCE IN AN INDONESIAN PRIVATE UNIVERSITY

Slamet Riyadi (Institut Bisnis dan Teknologi Al-Washliyah Sibolga)

Jurnal Konseling Pendidikan Islam
Vol. 7 No. 3 (2026): Jurnal Konseling Pendidikan Islam

Lecturer performance is central to higher education quality, yet performance cannot be adequately understood through productivity indicators alone. This study explored how lecturers experience work motivation and work stress and how these experiences shape teaching, research, community engagement, and student mentorship. An interpretive phenomenological design was used with 15 full-time lecturers at a medium-sized private university in Jakarta, Indonesia. Participants were purposively selected using maximum variation criteria and completed semi-structured interviews lasting 45–75 minutes. Data were analyzed through Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic analysis, supported by reflexive attention to participants’ meaning-making and contextual accounts. Four motivational resources emerged: intrinsic passion, extrinsic rewards, collegial support, and institutional recognition. Five recurring demands shaped experiences of stress: excessive workload, role ambiguity, resource insufficiency, work–life imbalance, and bureaucratic pressure. Across accounts, motivation and stress were experienced as dynamically interconnected rather than as independent predictors of performance. Intrinsic motivation enabled lecturers to sustain teaching and research effort under demanding conditions, while collegial support functioned as an important social resource. However, persistent workload, ambiguity, and inadequate resources progressively weakened these protective capacities and were associated with exhaustion and reduced performance. Participants also identified student mentorship as a meaningful but comparatively under-recognized dimension of academic work. The findings extend motivation and job-demands perspectives by showing how individual motivational resources depend on relational and institutional conditions. The study suggests that sustainable lecturer performance requires workload redesign, clearer institutional priorities, protected autonomy, stronger collegial structures, and recognition of mentoring and other forms of academic labor.