BRISTOL, U.K. — There are big differences in management practices in UK universities, notably in how well they manage the recruitment, retention and promotion of staff. This has a significant impact on outcomes: better-managed departments have better performance in terms of both research quality and student satisfaction.
These are among the findings of a new study published recently by the Economic Journal. The University of Bristol research team, led by John McCormack and professors Carol Propper and Sarah Smith, examine the relationship between universities’ research and teaching performance and tried-and-tested measures of the quality of management both at the department level and within their central administrations. The results show that:
• Use of incentives – the freedom to attract, retain and reward good performers – is the key area of management practices that matter for both research and teaching outcomes. Monitoring and targets are much less important in explaining the performance of universities.
• It is the quality of recruitment, retention and promotion practices at the department level that matters most for performance. It makes no difference whether management is good or bad in the human resources department of the same university.
• University management is relatively decentralized compared with many other kinds of organizations, including multi-plant manufacturing firms and hospitals. One department within a university can have good management practices while another scores poorly.
• There are big differences in management practices between older, research-intensive universities and newer, more teaching-oriented universities.
• While there are differences in resources across the four different types of universities, the results on management and performance cannot be explained by the level of resources.
• Management matters in the same way in universities that focus on teaching and educating local students as it does in research-intensive universities.
To conduct their study, McCormack and his partners use a measure of management quality that has been applied to over 10,000 organizations in manufacturing, retail, hospitals, schools, social care and elsewhere. They use the assessment tool to interview around 250 heads of departments in business, computer science, psychology and English in over 100 universities in the UK. They complement this with interviews with the heads of human resources departments to measure the quality of management at the level of universities’ central administrations.
For the complete findings, go to: http://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12105/abstract
McCormack attended New Sweden Consolidated School and Caribou High School where he graduated with the Class of 1986. He went on to study for his BS in political science and philosophy at Boston College. He attained graduate degrees from The University of Paris, The Free University of Brussels, and The University of Maryland.
McCormack is currently working for the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom where he teaches management. He is currently the director of the University’s undergraduate management programs as well as teaching qualitative methods and project management. He is passionately engaged in encouraging wider access to University for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and is currently serves as the Widening Participation advocate for the social sciences faculty and is conducting research into how aspirations are formed in pre university students. His research interests focus on best practice modeling and implementation strategies where he has evaluated sectors as diverse as physician practices, foster care agencies, and secondary school systems.
Before returning to academia, McCormack served in marketing and sales roles at Cisco Systems and Merrill Lynch, as well as serving as a captain in the U.S. Army. He is living in Bristol with his wife Chiara and three children; Sofia, 8, Anna, 3, and Jack, 10 months.
