Abstract:

The search of academic excellence is a key issue for Educational Institutions (Lord Brown Report 2010, OCDE, 2013) and it is also a theme that highly interest to citizens and policy makers worldwide (Horizon Report 2012, UE Education Report, 2012). The application of coordination mechanisms in the internal work processes at Universities can improve final results and explain higher degrees of Academic Excellence (Marengo and Dosi 2005; Brunner 2011; de Pablos et al., 2012).
The need of coordination is a pre-requisite to reach good results at organizations.
Therefore, the main objective of this research is to proof if the relational coordination (Gittell 2009, 2011) amongst team members at the University departments explains excellence in the upper education Spanish system.
We understand the research may be of interest for the evaluation of Universities by policy makers worldwide. In Universities the lecturer’s and researcher’s vocation and their sense of responsibility are highly important, but we find lacks in some other aspects that might be best explained in terms of relational coordination.
In this paper we mainly discuss and offer and adaptation of the Gittell’s model (2010) that can be used to measure the degree of relational coordination at Universities.
We have developed a survey to measure it and we want to share the survey with the University lecturers and researchers attending to the Conference to receive feedback on the aspects we have considered and the way we try to measure the different components. Receiving participant’s feedback will allow us improving the tool and enriching it to foster future empirical analysis in different university contexts.
The survey we present is divided in 7 groups of questions,

• General information. Type of university, size, personal situation of the researcher//lecturer at the university, the nature of the work developed at the University, student’s evaluation, mobility, quality standards of publications reached and the level of employability reached in the context the University is operating in.
• Organizational benefits. Data related to the increase in organizational satisfaction.
• Work practices. Work practices oriented to achieve final objectives: recruitment policies, policies for measuring performance, training programs, information systems, external collaborations.
• Communication mechanisms. The frequency in the use of teaching and researching tools, the real need that different departments at the Universities have to offer information at certain times. The degree of accuracy, the frequency and problem solving nature of the information,
• Shared knowledge. The need that different profiles at the Universities have to share information and knowledge
• Mutual respect. The profiles solving problems when they appear, the perception researchers/professors have about how others respect their work.
• Sharing of goals. The perception different professors/researchers have about the sharing of goals in their departments.

Keywords:

Academy excellence, coordination, organizational practices.