Strategic Renewal and Development Implications of Organisational Effectiveness Research in Higher Education in Australia

Higher education around the world has been undergoing a period of rapid change. In order to cope with this complexity and turbulence, corporate management practices have been embraced. In many cases the experiment has been ill-conceived, laborious and even aborted. The reasons mooted for this range from 'scant relevant literature on universities' to 'their applicability to the public sector is largely untested' (Hughes & Sohler 1992). The thesis of this paper is that organisational effectiveness (OE) research has made considerable progress in empirically deriving a systematic framework of theoretical and practical utility. This research field is briefly summarised and an Australian higher education taxonomy grounded in the competing values framework is illustrated (Lysons 1990b, 1993). The emerging inter-organisational comparisons and profiles are discussed in relation to their importance as a diagnostic tool for strategic planning, organisational renewal and development.