Performance Management in Higher Education - Development versus Control

Since the late 1980s higher education in Australia has been the focus of major restructure and reform in a search for greater efficiency, effectiveness and accountability. A key component has been performance management of academic staff with performance appraisals being the main process used. This paper examines enterprise bargaining agreements of universities to explore the status of performance management. It asks a number of questions such as: What do performance management systems look like? Are they linked to strategic goals? What feedback mechanisms are used? Do they have a developmental or monitoring/ control focus? It concludes that universities express a strategic link to performance management with the result that individual academic performance is increasingly being linked to organisational goals. However the use of performance management as a developmental or monitoring/control tool is less clear. This is apparent as performance appraisals are being used to reward staff in areas that were traditionally considered as standard working rights and conditions.