Performance Appraisal in Universities—Assessing the Tension in Public Service Motivation (PSM)

Łukasz Sułkowski,Colin Borg,Sylwia Przytuła,Konrad Kulikowski

doi:10.3390/educsci10070174

Abstract

Performance appraisal (PA) has become a prominent feature on the agenda of higher education institutions (HEIs). However, the traditional culture of the typical university is based on individual commitment, scientific teamwork, dedication to public service and intrinsic motivation of the academic staff, all of which are the essential components of public service motivation (PSM). By interviewing key informants from three public universities, the purpose of our research was to identify various tensions between PA and PSM, by asking what is the impact of PA on PSM of academics in public HEIs. Our findings have shown that the purposefulness of PA activities may not be fully understood by public HEI management and academics. The existing tensions between PA normative aims of motivation and fair evaluation and its descriptive effects of increasing bureaucracy and dissatisfaction might undermine PSM, an essential driving force that motivates academics to work in public HEIs.

Highlights

Performance appraisal (PA) is only one facet of a performance management (PM) framework in an organisation and is the process of assessing an employee’s performance towards achieving institutional performance targets
Treating universities as business organisations is associated with neoliberalism, and the new public management (NPM) and performance appraisals tend to be perceived as black boxes in a larger NPM
We suggest that besides desired changes in human resources (HR) management such as accountability, objective measurement, the process from initial to final phase is related to the unintended changes in the academic job characteristic leading to substitution of public service motivation (PSM) by instrumental motivation to attaining a high enough evaluation score

Summary

Introduction

Performance appraisal (PA) is only one facet of a performance management (PM) framework in an organisation and is the process of assessing an employee’s performance towards achieving institutional performance targets. Various forms and practices of performance appraisal have been implemented by hundreds of universities throughout the Western world [5,6,7,8]. Treating universities as business organisations is associated with neoliberalism, and the new public management (NPM) and performance appraisals tend to be perceived as black boxes in a larger NPM ‘machine’ [9]. The traditional culture of the university is based on a large extent on Merton’s CUDOS(communism, universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism) ethos reflected in individual commitment, scientific teamwork, dedication and intrinsic motivation over extrinsic rewards of the academic staff [12,13], which are components of public service motivation (PSM).

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