Today let's revisit the topic of From Whence We Derive Our Job Satisfaction, assuming that there is job satisfaction being derived.
So, for those of you who enjoy your jobs (academic or otherwise), is the source of your feeling of job-enjoyment related at least in part to:
A. your department (or non-academic equivalent)?; i.e., a unit larger than your immediate research/work group, but within your institution);
B. your more distant professional environment? In the academic example, this would be people in your research field who are not in your department.
C. your own work and/or that of your immediate research group?
There are other possibilities than those listed (e.g., I am, for once, not mentioning cats), but for these options, typical answers might be:
A-B-C (for people quite content with their professional environment)
A ± C but not B; or B ± C but not A.
c would be unfortunate if it were not combined with A or B, but that would at least be better than deriving no job satisfaction at all.
I wonder what the most common situation is. From scattered comments to blog posts over the years, there has been a persistent mention of B-but-not-A.
My answers to this question have varied with time. I was in a C-only situation very early in my career (grad school/postdoc), and was briefly in an A-C situation in my first tenure-track job when I was happy in my department but had yet to establish a reputation in my field and was finding it difficult to get the respect of a certain close network of older (male) professors in my field (solution: publish a lot, get grants, find a research niche).
Then there were some B-C times in which I wasn't particularly happy in my department, but I was otherwise doing well professionally and enjoying my research and research group.
Now I'd say A-B-C, but it took a while to get there.