Abstract:

In today's era of globalization, higher education institutions (HEI) face constant challenges. More and more competitive environments are emerging in the various markets and one of the main objectives that has assumed particular relevance in the scope of their activities is the creation of value for the institutions and their financial sustainability. HEI performance has been changed significantly, once these educational institutions are now forced to look for new sources of funding, assuming more and more the characteristics of a competitive market. In this way, HEI that want to assert themselves in the markets should focus on strategic objectives that ensure financial sustainability like any other organizations in other sectors. For this purpose, it will be necessary to know their business processes very well, adopting a management approach that allows them to evaluate their quality and performance, both in national and international markets. The institutions seek to improve their competitiveness by implementing management strategies oriented towards quality and financial sustainability, using performance measurement systems that include a wide variety of financial and non-financial measures (Strives et al., 1998). The advantages of non-financial performance measures have been cited in the literature (Eccles, 1991; Lambert, 2001; Langfield-Smith et al., 2006), highlighting that these measures focus particularly on a long-term perspective, leading to better organizational performance. These measures enable managers to better understand the relationships between the various strategic objectives, facilitate communication between employees' actions and defined goals, and assist in the allocation of resources and the definition of priorities, taking into account those strategic objectives. In this context, it is extremely important to identify performance indicators, both financial and non-financial, which allow the evaluation of HEI in terms of quality and performance. Measuring the performance of organizational goals is a key issue in the management of HEIS because without these measurement systems, organizations will not be able to efficiently and effectively deal with the uncertainty related to the contexts in which they are inserted (Vieira et al., 2009). Following this evidence, this communication proposes a research model defined in two distinct stages. In the first stage, it is intended to define the financial and non-financial indicators considered most relevant in the evaluation of the quality and performance of HEI. Consequently, this research proposal intends to develop a model of analysis of cause and effect relationship between these indicators and the referred dimensions. Regarding the methodology, the data will be obtained through the application of a questionnaire in order to evaluate the different dimensions of the proposed conceptual model. The sample will be for convenience, consisting of about 200 emails from teachers and members of the management boards of Portuguese universities and polytechnics. In the treatment of quantitative data, a model of structural equations (SEM) will be used, in order to investigate the possible relations between the different dimensions incorporated in the model. In terms of discussion of results, it is intended to characterize the various financial and non financial indicators, seeking to understand their role and possible relations with the quality and performance of these institutions.

Keywords:

Total Quality Management, Higher Education, Organizational Performance, Financial Indicators, Non Financial Indicators.