The Emmy Noether Programme funding junior research group leaders is one of the most prestigious funding programmes for promoting excellent young postdoctoral researchers in Germany. While the traditional academic career path involved postdoctoral researchers working in research projects chosen usually by faculty members, this research group funding programme offers financial resources for a research project of personal choice. This provides a high degree of research autonomy for comparatively young and strongly performing postdoctoral researchers. This full autonomy and freedom of research contrasts sharply with substantial uncertainty concerning the status that this new category of academic staff has among teaching staff at the faculty. The paper investigates the relative advantages and disadvantages of such funding instruments by using and comparing various methods in a triangulation design.
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Böhmer et al. (2009) studied this question.