Governance in Public Universities: An Upper Echelon Theory Approach

Rodrigues Junior Rodrigues Junior, Thamara Marcos dos Santos

Abstract


Public governance uses leadership, strategy, and control mechanisms, so good governance practices are necessary for university management. Thus, the heterogeneity of characteristics would aggregate broader sets of knowledge. Our objective is to identify how the diversity of the attributes of top management team influences the quality of governance in Brazilian public universities. We use the ordinary least squares method for the regression of panel data. We collected the identification of the management team on the universities’ website and we identified the governance situation in Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts survey. The results indicate that the diversity of managers’ titles had a positive influence, and age diversity had a negative effect. The research informs public policymakers and managers about the best composition of management teams, aiming for better performance. Furthermore, based on results, we observed the importance of training programs to improve the skills of managers of newer Higher Education Institutions. 


Keywords


Upper echelons theory; Universities; Public governance; Top management team; Diversity

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/13562

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