ИСТИНА

The Paper focuses on contemporary university teachers’ attitudes towards their work with particular attention to the issues of motivation and ways to overcome professional fatigue of experienced teachers. The author argues that, unlike compassion fatigue syndrome or teacher burnout, professional fatigue that usually results from excessive workloads may also be brought about by lack of creative energy caused by other reasons. Using socio-cultural approach to the stated issues and results of the survey offered to academics at Moscow State University, the paper gives an overview of the processes in today’s academia that affect teachers’ motivation and therefore performance. It attempts to identify motivational factors that not only remain relevant even in the situation of overwork but help to cope with it facilitating the sometimes necessary acceptance of heavier workloads. Some of these factors seem to have been ignored by researchers, probably because on the one hand they may be regarded as parts of the well-known theoretical classifications such as by Maslow and Herzberg and, on the other, they are not, for a number of reasons, exactly popular with professional managers both in industry and academia. In search of such seemingly ignored factors, it may be useful to turn to literary images of high cognition value, in this case images created by the Russian (Soviet) author Oleg Kuvaev in his book “The Territory”(1973). Having drawn some parallels between the ideas expressed in the book and the findings of both management theory and recommendations by practicing managers, the Paper highlights some of the unrevealed, forgotten or deliberately ignored factors that determine work motivation of university teachers. Keywords: university teachers, motivation factors, teaching and research outcomes.