Abstract
Over the last decades, procedures of compiling, measuring and evaluating academic performance have made incursions into the realm of universities. The result is an effect on employment negotiations, increased competitive performance measurement in funding allocation and, in the context of salary distribution, impact on how individual and collective achievements of academic staff are compared among each other or between different research institutions. Despite the pervasiveness of this type of systematic performance measurement impinging upon nearly all university activities, we still know little about whether these systems matter for researchers under evaluation. Based on empirical insights from an evaluation at a large German university, we discuss perceptions of professors exposed to one university performance measurement system. That exposure seems to trigger, in particular, worrisome attitudes of ambivalence towards the university and the academic value system.
The authors thank Jacob Watson for his great editorial support, Tim Seitz for immediate but thorough research assistance and their anonymous reviewers for encouraging a substantial revision of the chapter’s original version. Tim Flink owes gratitude to Chia-Yu Kou for her advice on dealing with insights from organizational psychology.
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Notes
- 1.
Arguably, NPM reforms pertaining to German higher education and science institutions were heralded by the German Council for Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) suggesting in its recommendations on Competition of the German Higher Education System (1985) that evaluations should enhance “achievements by means of a public comparison” and bring about “transparency in achievement” (WR 1985). One goal was to counteract an increasing loss of trust in the capability of the scientific community to regulate itself, exhibited both by the political administration and the general public (Krücken and Maier 2007), while other goals, e.g., to make Germany’s science system internationally more competitive (WR 1992), ensure gender equality (WR 1998), better and structured training of young researchers (WR 2002) were consecutively linked up to this reform.
- 2.
The W-salary directive regulates the salaries of professors in the German higher education system consisting of a basic pay (lower in comparison to the former C-salary) and a top-up pay remitted to the individual professor depending on his/her performance in research and teaching as well as on tasks and responsibilities of academic self-organization (e.g., university presidencies, faculty responsibilities).
- 3.
These include the works of Deci et al. (1989), Jensen/Murphy (1990), Gneezy and Rustichini (2000), Osterloh/Frey (2000), Ryan/Deci (2000), Kunz and Pfaff (2002), Bock et al. (2005), Ederer and Manso (2012), a great deal of which discusses the gulf of economic or behavioral management premises of rational, i.e., selfish and extrinsically motivated human beings versus psychologically informed premises of self-determined human beings, who might be motivated by extrinsic rewards indirectly, while experiencing gratification if they perceive their activities as enjoyable, challenging and purposeful (for a brilliant literature review, see Weibel et al. 2010).
- 4.
Flink et al. (2012) surveyed professors with high performance in research at German universities (N = 2,538), the findings illustrated that professors care much less about their university profile but most about their own research interests and their peer community.
- 5.
The exact number of criteria is not specified here to ensure case anonymity.
- 6.
To give you some examples how achievements are translated into points: supervision and assessment of dissertations/habilitations = 40 points; book publication = 16 points; peer-reviewed article = 8 points; student thesis supervision and/or exam assessment = 2 points; reviewing a research proposal = 2 points; student exam = 1 point.
- 7.
The achievements are controlled by the administration. As an example, publications need to be referenced with international standard book numbers, or assessed exams require the adding of student identification numbers.
- 8.
All faculties developed their individual allocation model to receive funds from the university management.
- 9.
Reviewed annually by the university management, the input of achievements can be carried out continually over the course of the year. An advisory council, consisting of professors from different faculties, acts as a switchboard between the professors, who can send in questions or criticism or suggest amendments, and the university management, which decides about how to deal with professorial requests.
- 10.
Professors can only rise up to a higher rank, if their performance is sustained for a period of 3 years.
- 11.
If professors demonstrate steady performance over a long period of time, an application for the removal of the time limit for the performance-related bonus can be accepted by the university management.
- 12.
At least, this is what professors reported to us.
- 13.
We pursued two distinct goals by carrying out expert interviews: (1) gain technical knowledge, i.e., about administrative competences and specialized knowledge pertaining to the measurement system, (2) to look out for process-related knowledge about potentially interesting interactions, decisions and organizational dynamics and (3) detect interpretive schemas borne by everyday knowledge that the interviewees have generated in grappling with the measurement system (see Bogner et al. 2009).
- 14.
All interviews were conducted in German. The sequences displayed in this chapter were translated by the authors.
- 15.
The online survey was developed and implemented using the software limesurvey.
- 16.
We neither addressed professors on the salary grade W1, nor guest professors, special professors and acting professors, as they do not take part in the university performance measurement system.
- 17.
The high number of variables in comparison to the number of questions is due to the differentiated sampling of varying circumstances for professors on the C- and W-salary scales.
- 18.
It is important to note that all personal information was immediately coded and that correlations were made on such aggregate level that it guarantees full anonymity to surveyed staff.
- 19.
The survey question to be answered was “The procedure of the [name of the] system assessing and rating my performance is overall fair.” The highest rejection (64 %) comes from engineering scientists, followed by the social sciences/humanities (62 %), life sciences (45 %) and natural sciences (44 %), without any statistically significant differences according to professors’ salary status, gender and age.
- 20.
The high level of support for performance-related bonuses in academic pay was positively correlated (Pearson r = 0.389, p < 0.01) with the incremental value obtained for research. This means professors who perform highly in research are those fundamentally in favor of the W salary directive. With regard to teaching, this correlation was however not determined.
- 21.
Questions pertaining to control experience were actor-specifically differentiated. Over 70 % strongly impute steering interests to the university presidency (another 10 % rather confirm this), while deans and faculty administrations were only selected by 40 % (strong confirmation), and each by further 18 % (weaker confirmation).
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Biester, C., Flink, T. (2015). The Elusive Effectiveness of Performance Measurement in Science: Insights from a German University. In: Welpe, I., Wollersheim, J., Ringelhan, S., Osterloh, M. (eds) Incentives and Performance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09785-5_24
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