New Public Management
(NPM), a doctrine offering private sector practices as a cure for public sector
inefficiencies, has been adopted by several Western governments in their search
for efficiency and modernization (Hood, 1995). NPM reforms have led to numerous
transformations in the public sector, including in higher education
organizations. Currently, in the post-NPM era, universities are increasingly
competing with each other nationally and internationally with different
performance criteria, e.g., different university rankings (see e.g., Brown,
2013; Kallio, 2014).

In this study, we
examine the contradictory goals resulting from the universities’ performance
measurement (PM) systems. The study is based on thematic interviews with the
administrative managers of 12 university departments in Finland, which revealed
different and conflicting managerial and/or organizational goals experienced by
the departments. We call these conflicting goals dilemmas (see Hampden-Turner,
1990). In the data analysis, three core dilemma pairs, consisting of
conflicting organizational goals and values in the higher education PM context
were identified: performance measurement versus the nature of the work carried
out in universities, the idea of rewarding good performance versus the
efficient use of scarce economic resources, and performance in teaching versus
performance in research.

In our analysis, we
suggest solutions to the dilemmas in the universities’ PM, all of which arose
from the ways in which the different case departments dealt with the
conflicting interests. Consequently, some of the university departments in our
study solved the tensions of contradictory goals more successfully than others,
and thus the departments could possibly learn from one another. This study
contributes to the existing research on the governance of the higher education
PM system, bringing in dilemma theory to illuminate its contradictions
(Hampden-Turner, 1990; Kuoppakangas, 2015; Suomi et al., 2014).