Proceedings

length of their presence at their workplace, their task accomplishment on time, and
their concern with costs and budgets have been the indicators for this variable.
As reward system of faculty members and other staff are slightly different in Iran’s
universities, it has been endeavoured to measure “Improvement in Reward System”
separately in two questions. Proper relationship between amounts of salary, other
earning, and annual promotion with job performance were common in two questions.
The question regarding other staff has a fourth section to obtain their opinion about
proper link between staff’s overtime payment and their job performance. Using the
formats and anchors employed by Cravens and Guilding (2001), Guilding (2002), and
Cadez and Guilding (2008) a four-section question was asked from all managers to
assess the extent of their “Usage of Accounting Information for Performance
Management”. The aspects of performance management were adapted to the Iran’s
circumstances based on the framework proposed by Otley (1999) including goal
definition and standard setting, performance measurement and comparing to the
targets, expenditure controlling and decision-making, and rewarding and
compensation.
For measuring “Universities’ Departmental Performance” the instrument of Merchant
(1981) which has been used by other researchers such as Brownell and Merchant
(1990) and Dunk (1995) was employed. To avoid from massive subjectivity bias, five
key performance indicators which are normally used by different departments in
Iranian universities were placed in the questionnaires. For Education Departments the
indicators are the rate of graduation during the planned period, quality of instructors
which can be measured based on combination of faculty members (more lecturers=1,
more full professor=6), graduates’ success in passing entrance exams to study in
upper levels, graduates success in finding jobs compared to other universities, and
quality of programmes and courses. Employed key performance indicators for
Research Departments include “number of national publications”, “number of
international publications”, “number of applied research projects and contracts”,
“number of registered patents and inventions”, and “amount of research income”. Key
performance indicators for Financial Departments are ability to pay for expenses and
liabilities on time, new investment in constructing or purchasing new buildings, new
investment in teaching, research, and experimental assets and facilities, growth in
other revenues other than governmental budgets, and percentage of saved budgets at
the end of each year. All of them were requested to rate their overall performance
compared to their counterparts in other universities as the sixth questions.
3. METHODOLOGY
The suitable philosophy and paradigm for this study seemed to be positivism and
functionalist and, as it was mentioned earlier, Contingency Theory was adopted as the
underlying theory for it. Choosing cross sectional survey as research strategy, data
were collected from the Governmental Universities in Iran during the latter part of
2009 through a postal questionnaire. Three main divisions of activity namely
Research Department, Education Department, and Financial Department of all 126
Governmental Universities in Iran were sent the questionnaire. Therefore, the
population of this study was 378 departments of Iranian State Universities.
~ 100 ~