QUALITY MANAGEMENT AND PERFORMANCE DIMENSIONS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Public higher education institutions (HEIs) face financial constraints due to tighter budgets from government, and the press make use of performance indicators to rank institutions. Concerns about funding and rankings are attracting attention from governments, planners and policy makers. This is having an impact on educational institutions and is leading them to implement various strategies, such as adopting quality practices. This makes quality issues important for educational institutions.

A number of theoretical and empirical studies analyse different aspects of the application of quality management (QM) concepts in HEIs, including teaching areas. However, only a few papers develop a literature review on QM in HEIs.

The aim of this paper is to propose a set of practices to implement QM and a set of performance dimensions in HEIs. The paper starts with a review of the literature to identify the most common quality management practices based on studies about quality management in commerce and papers about quality management in higher education. Then, it identifies the practices suggested by European bodies in academia and suggests performance dimensions.

First, in order to identify QM practices and performance dimensions in literature about QM in HEIs, the search considers articles that analyse QM practices in HEIs in teaching and research areas. Overall the research focuses on articles published in peer-reviewed academic business and educational journals. This paper does not consider work in the trade or popular press. Accordingly, this paper identifies the most common practices used to measure QM in HEIs (for the whole institution) based on those most commonly cited in the literature. Second, the paper analyses the AUDIT programme in Spain, published by the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) and the ENQA guidelines to compare the literature review of the dimensions of QM in HE with the dimensions in the AUDIT programme and the ENQA guidelines. Third, based on the two previous reviews the paper identifies the most common effects of QM practices on HEIs performance in order to propose a set of performance dimensions and indicators.

The findings show the QM practices and the performance dimensions in HEIs based on a literature review. Regarding the QM practices, they are: people management, information and analysis, process management, stakeholder focus, planning, leadership, programme design and supplier management. The performance dimensions include variables related to student learning outcomes and other stakeholder outcomes, and organisational results (e.g. academic and research results). These QM practices and performance dimensions may be used by managers to develop and measure a quality culture and also by researchers to determine QM and performance dimensions which may be used by future studies in order to measure and assess QM culture in HEIs. In addition, the study supplements previous QM literature reviews in HEIs by specifying a set of QM and performance dimensions for HEIs.