Comparison of measures of organisational effectiveness in U.K. higher education

This paper is part of a program to study organisational effectiveness in higher educational institutions in the UK and Australia, and to compare the results with work conducted by Cameron (1981, 1986) in the USA. Cameron's work empirically derived and confirmed nine effectiveness dimensions and offered a typology of four institutional groups. In the UK, following surveys of the perceptions of senior academics and administrators concerning their own institutions, Lysons and Hatherly (1992, 1996) obtained results highly consistent with those of Cameron, and their analysis also supported a typology of four groups, namely classical redbrick universities, former polytechnics, former colleges of technology and 60's greenfield universities.An important further issue is the external validity of such effectiveness research particularly when discriminating between various categories of institutions. This paper uses data derived independently of the perceptual survey data to predict and confirm the taxonomy of four institutional groups already established in the prior UK research. These data come from the research ratings of the Universities Funding Council (UFC) and the Times Good University Guide. The Times data includes objective statistical data about each institution whilst the UFC ratings are based on the expert judgements of research assessment panels with representation from a range of institutions.The typology of four institutional groupings confirmed by the data analysed in this paper is consistent with the competing values explanations for organisational taxonomies (Quinn and Rohrbaugh 1983; Lysons 1993).