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It's vacation time at the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) and the faculty members are calling each other to check the score. Just that the score has no correlation to the ongoing Indian Premier League cricket season.
Faculty members, instead, are curious about the new performance management system (PMS), where their teaching and non-teaching activities, including research and administration, are assigned scores for earning incentives. Last year, the institute had initiated a new system of setting targets, assigning scores and offering incentives, based on the scores for teaching and non-teaching activities.
Following suit, other institutes, including IIM-Calcutta, IIM-Trichy and IIM-Udaipur, have initiated various systems to measure their faculty's performance. At IIM-Lucknow, for instance, faculty members' salaries would now carry a variable pay component based on targets achieved, such as the number of research papers, number of teaching hours and quality of teaching methods, as well as participation in consulting projects, among others.
"The good thing is that I can aggregate my scores over three years. The downside is the stress that comes from wanting to know how much score one has earned. In academic institutes, non-teaching activities are part of one's job. Hence, a person can get tense over how much of each activity he has finished and how much incentive he is liable for," said a faculty member at IIM-Ahmedabad.
Moreover, it is perceived that Indian academicians, compared with their Western counterparts, are more inclined towards teaching than research, and, hence, such a system would add pressure on them.
"There is a general inclination towards teaching among Indian faculty members. That is the reason one needs to find encouragement for them to pursue or enhance research activities," said Janat Shah, director of IIM-Udaipur, which has a research incentive scheme. According to Shah, the institute also has a liberal faculty development allowance in place, to encourage faculty members to seek overall development.
Further, IIM-Calcutta says it is important to understand that all faculty members have a different set of strengths. All teachers need not be good researchers and a good researcher need not necessarily be a good teacher. Thus, faculty members at the institute decided to draw a three-year plan for themselves.
"We decided that a faculty member may be allowed to choose his or her mix and declare it for the next three years. What we have noticed is that when people declare their plans, sheer peer pressure makes them work to achieve it. No one else needs to judge them," said Ajit Balakrishnan, founder chairman and chief executive officer of Rediff.com and chairperson of IIM-Calcutta.
According to a director of one of the IIMs, in their recent meeting with the ministry of human resource development (MHRD), the latter had sought details on how the premier
B-schools were going about such a system.
"Technically, each IIM will have to decide on its own (whether to develop a faculty's teaching and non-teaching evaluation system as part of the compensation package). But, it's true that we, as IIMs, need to have some system. The problem is how to measure research. There have to be quality and effort indicators in evaluating research," said the director, who did not want to be named. "We are trying to be as comprehensive as possible, by ascribing indicators for various research and other non-teaching activities, based on the effort and quality of that work."
At IIM-Trichy, the board recently approved rewarding faculty members financially for using their services other than academically.
"My experience has been that whichever department faculty member supervises sees a smooth run. So far, we were giving only credits to faculty members for their total workload. Thus, we decided to pay faculty members for their services other than academics," said Prafulla Agnihotri, director, IIM-Trichy.
Shah is also of the view that faculty members should be freed from administration work. "Faculty members are also involved in admission, placements and other administration work. Why should the faculty do that? At IIM-Udaipur, therefore, we don't have faculty doing administration work; they merely oversee it."
REPORT CARD
- Last year, IIM-A initiated a new system of setting targets, assigning scores and offering incentives based on scores for teaching and non-teaching activities
- At IIM-Lucknow, faculty members' salaries would now carry a variable pay, based on targets achieved, such as the number of research papers, the number of teaching hours and the quality of teaching methods, as well as participation in consulting projects, among others
- Other institutes, including IIM-Calcutta, IIM-Trichy and IIM-Udaipur, have initiated various systems to measure the faculty's performance
