It is February 2019. Dr. Angus Krystos is Dean of Faculty at the Geelong International Business School (GIBS). GIBS is an independently financed school of the publicly owned and funded University of Western Victoria (UWV)1.
The key resource for GIBS is their academics. Business academics are in short supply and have other attractive options, including work as full time consultants. An important part of Angus’s role is to
recruit and retain quality academics, who can both teach and research at a high level.
For the past three years, a new formal appraisal system for academics had been in place, linked to remuneration. All academics sign a contract which requires them to be formally appraised each year. The contract states that “equal weight will be given to teaching and research”. There is a yearly bonus pool and this bonus pool is divided up amongst all faculty, but a larger bonus is given to those who receive a higher appraisal, how much larger being at the Dean’s discretion.
Angus’s task is to appraise the 36 full time academics currently employed at GIBS, to communicate and explain the results of this exercise to them and to possibly make revisions to the appraisal system to be rolled out in the future, if appropriate.
Industry background.
If you think that tertiary education is somehow not the “real world” then think again. The Australian university system employs some 70,000 academics who both conduct research and deliver education to over 1.5 million students yearly. Many of these are full fee paying overseas students. In fact, university education is Australia’s second largest export earner, eclipsed only by mining. It is as essential to the Australian economy as call centres and software development are to India.
Organisation background.
GIBS, a completely financially independent entity to UWV, has a suite of popular and lucrative executive programs and a distance delivered MBA course. However, the flagship degree is their full time 12 month MBA and it is largely on this degree that the school’s reputation and credibility rests.
Two thirds of these students are from overseas with most students paying full fees of around AUD$80,000. The local students are eligible for government loans to support their studies. While GIBS does not receive any funding from UWV, its degrees have been accredited by that university since the school’s founding in 1975. All GIBS academics are appointed according to standard university criteria and given honorary academic appointments at UWV so long as they are employed by GIBS. Professorial appointments must go through the usual UWV appointment procedures. The relationship with UWV is key to the schools continued existence and needs to be carefully tended.
1 This is real data and a real case but the School and University are obviously fictitious.
In return for GIBS paying its own way, the university does not impose any “tax” on the fees from students. Universities would typically tax at least 50% of full fee paying students. GIBS also enjoys exclusive use of a complex of university owned buildings though the cost of maintenance and any improvements are borne by GIBS. They also have premises in the central business district as well as an executive education site on the coast, some 10 km west of the campus.
What does UWV get out of this relationship? First, the reputation of having a very high profile business school without any of the risk. Second, all research generated by GIBS is attributed to UWV who receive block research funding from the federal government which is directly linked to their research output. GIBS receive none of this research funding even though they are doing the research.
Faculty performance management
Central to Angus’s role is recruiting new faculty as well as managing and developing their careers. Business academics are hard to attract and he is constantly reminded that faculty have other options. This manifests as a rather high turnover rate even for tenured faculty – much higher than in a conventional academic department.
Teaching.
Academics need to perform at a high level if the school is to maintain its reputation. Performance in the classroom is absolutely critical and high paying MBA students are not at all tolerant of courses that are poorly organised, badly delivered or not focused on business relevant problems.
The school surveys students at the end of each course who give a 1-5 rating on 9 different dimensions. For instance they are asked “Was the lecturer well organised?” “Were the assessment tasks appropriate?” These questions are mainly there to give the academic detailed feedback on areas for improvement.
But the critical question is question 8 which asks “Overall, how do you rate this course?” This question is on a 5 point scale, with 5 being good. So the school has information on how well the academic is performing overall in teaching, at least from the student’s point of view.
Historically, a lecturer’s performance in the class room has been measured by the sample mean of student responses to Q8 across all courses taught that year. Typical means are from 3.8 to 4.4, where the highest possible mean would be 5.0. For the past three years though, a different measure to the mean has been used, namely the % of responses in the range 3-5. This move was controversial as someone could get 100% rating even if every student rated their course as 3 which would be a poor mean historically. The rationale was that the school especially wants to avoid students being actively dissatisfied with a course. Some faculty members have had satisfaction ratings above 95%. Some are as low as 70% which means that 3 out of 10 students were actively dis-satisfied with the course.
Research.
On the other hand, academics need to do research in order to stay at the forefront of their field. Most academics actively want to do research; they are interested in their subject and see themselves as part of a larger academic community that contributes to knowledge.
From the school’s point of view, there are two reasons to care about research – even though they make no money directly from it. First, research ability is a proxy for the academic’s depth of understanding. This interest and engagement with their subject will surely spill over into other activities that more directly affect the school’s bottom line, not to mention their reputation. Second, academics value a highly productive and vibrant research environment, for their own stimulation and engagement. This can directly increase their research productivity. So, if a school’s research standing
starts to fall it becomes harder to attract good academics to work there. For research organisations, success truly breeds success and mediocrity breeds mediocrity.
Thus, research output is also a performance measure but one that is valued by a quite different pool of stakeholders – potential academics, which remember are in short supply. It is also valued by UWV who benefit from the earlier mentioned block research funding.
Research is difficult to measure. Not all research is of the same quality. Moreover, it is harder to publish research in some disciplines than others.
The balance.
All academics sign a contract which requires them to be formally appraised each year. The contract also states that
“equal weight will be given to teaching and research”.
The folklore is that better researchers will tend to make better teachers because of their deep understanding and enthusiasm for the subject. So one might expect that the best researchers would also be amongst the best teachers if it were not for the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day. Academics who expend a larger effort on teaching and developing up-to-date and innovative course materials will surely spend less time on research. This suggests a countervailing negative relationship between these two performance metrics. Angus wondered whether the data could tell him whether the better researchers tend to be better or worse teachers.
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