Cumulative advantage or job crafting? Organizational and psychological conditions of the development of research excellence in early career researchers

The aim of this integrative review is to analyze the contemporary research on individual and social conditions shaping a successful professional development of early career researchers. In this analysis, authors explore two lines of research, a sociological and a psychological. From the sociological perspective, the development of research excellence is detennined by social-organizational processes of "cumulative advantage" (Merton, 1988) which enable the development of selected individuals towards research excellence by an unequal distribution of available resources. From the psychological perspective, successful development of research excellence is determined by individual characteristics, such as motivation or individual activity in the academic community and research organization, which authors review within the organizational psychology framework of "job crafting" (Tims, Bakker, 2010). On this basis, authors propose an argument for an integrative "systemic" approach that merges these two perspectives into a unified framework in which authors seek a balanced view of social-organizational and individual-psychological processes and their mutual interactions. This systemic framework suggests that individual researchers striving for research excellence need not only to exhibit a high level of motivation and research-related activity but also engage in active creating of their position in academic community and research organization that allow them to participate in the processes of cumulative advantage. On the other hand, the research institutions should strive to mitigate the processes of cumulative advantage as these processes increase inequalities between the academics as well as institutions, distort the competition for available resources and in this way negatively affect the quality of research environment.