Managing Sustainable Performance and Governance in Higher Education Institutions : A Dynamic Performance Management Approach

Abstract

This book aims to cover about a decade of research activities devoted to university management, exploring its specific organizational complexity, and adopting systemic approaches to managing its performance generation mechanisms. It also draws on the field experience spent as the academic delegate for scientific support to strategic planning, management control, performance evaluation, and statistical reporting at the University of Palermo, Italy. This work is included in a series on “System Dynamics for Performance Management.” The fast-changing evolutionary process of global higher education systems systematically poses new challenges related to the appearance of innovative elements that lead academic governing bodies to question current managerial structures and methods. Due to this, theory and practice have gathered multiple contributions and experiences to support and further develop this evolutionary pathway during the past few decades. In the same vein, this book aims to draw on this flourishing debate on higher education policy and management and explore an innovative systemic perspective to design and implement sustainable performance management systems for academic institutions. The conditions for the success of universities, the critical issues underlying the creation of academic value, the dynamic complexity characterizing academic governance settings, the pluralistic audience of stakeholders and related expectations, and the causal interplays between organizational performance variables represent some of the central themes around which this work is developed. More specifically, the book suggests and discusses the adoption of a dynamic performance management (DPM) approach to frame the inherent organizational complexity of higher education institutions, thus supporting a strategic learning perspective to design and implement relevant performance measures. This approach originates from the combination between conventional performance management and system dynamics modeling. Many research and practice contributions prove that this methodological combination can boost the understanding and interpretation of value creation processes by identifying and exploring the causal connections among strategic resource allocation and consumption, corresponding performance drivers, emerging outputs, and outcomes.