New Public Management (NPM) has been the most inspiring principle of public sector reforms in Europe (Pollit and Bouckaert, 2004). However, the main obstacle to the effective implementation of NPM reforms has been the “implementation gap”, i.e. the distance between law’s prescription and actual existence of managerial tools and the distance between the formal presence of such tools and their utilization (Ongaro and Valotti, 2008).
Among the different fields in which NPM reform have been implemented (public sector accounting, health care), the Higher Education sector seems to be controversial for NPM reforms to become effective, since universities “are not organizations as the other” (Musselin, 2006, p. 63). Implementation problems arise for two main reasons: first of all, the HE sector has its own independent tradition of performance evaluation that makes it relatively different from other public sector domains (Ferlie et al., 2008; Frølich, 2011; Mintzberg, 1980), then performance measurement and management in universities is particularly challenging, because of the multi-dimensional performance of its activities, teaching, research, third mission and administrative services (Rabovsky, 2014; Rebora and Turri, 2011).
In Italy, the national government issued numerous regulatory interventions in the Italian university system aimed to improve the performance measurement system, and one of the most debated is, the Brunetta Reform (Decree. 150/2009), recently reviewed by the decree 74/2017. This Reform, and its recent revisions, mandated all the Italian public administration to provide two documents in which, first, both organizational and individual performance is planned (i.e. the Performance Plan) and, secondly, previously results are described and accounted (i.e. the Performance Relation).
As a comparative perspective, this paper wants to analyze the state of the art of the use and implementation of performance measurement system in Italian universities four years later compared to the research proposed by Dal Molin et al. (2017). Specifically, by applying a similar methodology of the above cited paper and by analyzing the same mandated documents, (Performance Plan and the Performance Relation), this research wants to understand if the implementation gap had decreased in the actual use of performance measurement system and at the same time identifying trajectories of best practices on the use of performance management system in the Italian universities. Following the above cited study, primary source of data are represented by the Performance Plan and the Performance Relation of 65 Italian universities, that have been investigated using the documentary analysis methodology.
As main result, the study shows a «dramatic situation» for the implementation and use of performance management system in Italian universities and there are areas of improvement in this analysis but the implementation gap is still is strongly present. However, from 2012 until now, the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities (ANVUR) have devoted several efforts to improve the use of performance management in universities. So, it has been considered the role of the Italian National Agency for the evaluation of universities (ANVUR) in order to favor the use of this tools as the basis to improve the overall organizational performance.
Keywords: performance measurement, university
Management and organizational performance in comparative perspective (PMRA-sponsored panel
IRSPM2018_BrunoDalMolin_Final.pdf 