Performance management and diversity in higher education: an introduction
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Performance management and diversity in higher education: an introduction Ana I. Melo 1,2,3
& Hugo Figueiredo
1,2,4
Received: 9 May 2019 / Accepted: 26 July 2019/ # The European Higher Education Society 2019
In recent years, higher education institutions have become somewhat fixated on the issue of performance. This has been visible in rankings (Williams and de Rassenfosse 2014), attempts to create national centres of excellence based on exceptional performance (Hazelkorn 2015), and performance-based funding (Rutherford and Rabovsky 2014), especially in relation to research performance (Anninos 2014; Bazeley 2010; Edgar and Geare 2013). Considering how common performance management systems have become, one might expect to find a consensus that these are generally successful (Gerrish 2015). Although many researchers argue performance information contributes for organisations to be more strategic and efficient, enabling service users and policy makers to hold them more accountable (Moynihan et al. 2011), a growing body of literature identifies potential policy design and implementation problems. In fact, some authors state that many performance management systems in public service organisations (including in higher education institutions) are poorly applied (Frederickson and Frederickson 2006; Radin 1998), or used (Melo et al. 2010; Melo and Sarrico 2015). According to Birdsall (2018, p. 671), for example, “politics, resource constraints, organizational capacity, institutional differences, and the nature of public goods and services create a number of complications that may make implementing performance management systems ineffective or harmful for public organizations”. Moreover, there are growing concerns that performance management systems may introduce perverse incentives, induce gaming and divert attention from unmeasured, but important organizational outputs or outcomes (Bohte and Meier 2000; Birdsall 2018; Gerrish 2015; Heinrich 2004; Moynihan 2006; Piotrowski and Rosenbloom 2002; Radin 2006). In fact, Bohte and Meier (2000) argue that using performance data to evaluate the work of organizations often means focusing on
* Ana I. Melo [email protected]
1
CIPES – Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies, R. 1° de Dezembro, 399, 4450-137 Matosinhos, Portugal
2
GOVCOPP - Research Unit on Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policies, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
3
ESTGA – School of Technology and Management, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
4
DEGEIT, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
Tertiary Education and Management
outputs rather than substantive contributions to social outcomes. Also, many of the identified problems may be caused by the difficulty to design policies that “accommodate the diverse capacities, resources, and missions of target organizations” (Birdsall 2018, p. 672). Nowhere this sounds truer than in the case of higher education institutions, considering their complex and multi-mission nature (Winston 1999; Weisbrod et al. 2008). Their specificity may be p
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