University dean personal characteristics and use of management control systems and performance measures

ABSTRACT

Drawing on upper echelon theory, we investigate whether university deans’ personal characteristics, including age, sex, educational background, and tenure are associated with their use of university management control systems (MCS), financial performance measures, and non-financial performance measures. We surveyed the dean of every faculty across Australia’s 39 public universities. Our results indicate that deans’ personal characteristics are associated with the emphasis they place on financial and non-financial performance measures and the manner in which they use MCS. Given the decision-making powers of deans in the corporatised university, this differing emphasis on performance measures and varying use of MCS is likely to impact university outcomes. We offer suggestions as to how university MCS could be designed and performance measures presented to take into account the particular characteristics of deans to enhance university outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Levers of control
• management control systems
• performance measures
• universities
• upper echelon theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Belete J. Bobe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8331-4456

Ralph Kober http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2503-9211

Notes

1 We acknowledge that a dean may not be in a position to design the MCS implemented by a university, as these may be imposed upon them at the vice-chancellery level. This is why we investigate the manner in which deans use MCS that are already in place.

2 Examples of financial performance in the context of universities include tuition income, research income and salary costs; examples of non-financial performance measures are student enrolment number by programme, teaching satisfaction survey results, student retention rates, and research publications.

3 Refer to the section ‘Management control systems’ for a detailed discussion on what is meant by the terms interactively and diagnostically.

4 In line with the arguments presented by Kimmel, Hearn, and Connell (2005), we use the term ‘sex’ to be biologically framed (i.e., female and male), compared with the term ‘gender’, which is more culturally defined.

5 Due to the differences in settings between Naranjo-Gil and Hartmann (2006) (public hospitals) and the current research (universities), it is not possible to use the questions from Naranjo-Gil and Hartmann (2006) relating to the use of financial and non-financial information.

6 In addition to both authors being academics, prior to entering academia the first named author was an administrative manager in several universities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deakin University and RMIT University.