Strategic, Performance, and Competency Management Models in Higher Education: A Narrative Review on Change Management

Introduction

Organizational performance, competency management models, and strategic management are key management pillars of institutions. Organizational performance is defined as ‘organization's actual output or outcomes in comparison to its expected outputs (or goals and objectives)‘ (Rehman & Rehmat, 2022). Organizations are complex systems, which need to be understood before the implementation of management changes (e.g., through the carefully construction and analysis of activity-system maps of organizations) (Wu and Sekiguchi, 2023).

The three principal objectives of organizational performance management are ‘(i) to assist organizations in formulating and evaluating the strategy, (ii) to motivate people/workers and (iii) to communicate performance indicators to the stakeholders‘ (Felizardo et al., 2017). Performance measurement systems may be defined based on different purposes/targets. For instance, measures of strategic performance can be used to give a strategic direction to staff or to enhance staff and organizational capabilities, or both (Tolici, 2021). The contemporary performance measurement systems of organizations use financial and non-financial performance indicators. These evaluations can lead to new strategic opportunities (Grafton et al., 2010). Both worker or organizational performance should be person-centered (e.g., human resources (HR) or stakeholders) (Grafton et al., 2010; Han and Hong, 2019; Harrison et al., 2010). Additionally, worker and/or organizational performance should be incorporated in a strategic model, which can be measured by informatization means (Anwar et al., 2016; Dong et al., 2022; George et al., 2019).

A strategic model is an aggregating model, which is based on a specific project and strategic objectives from a certain organization, such as a faculty (Shu-Hsiang et al., 2015). In this model, all employees should work together to improve results (Lee & Miller, 1999). Besides the evaluation of organization/workers performance, the strategic model encompasses a competence management model, since workers’ behaviors, and competencies should reflect the principles of organizational strategy (Campion et al., 2020). For instance, the management of human resources is also a strategic process, which must be guided by the organization's strategy (Hans, 2021). Among others, the management of human resources aims to measure and evaluate the productivity and wellbeing of workers in an organization as well as both “corporate” and “social” interests should be considered (Kowalski & Loretto, 2017; Owen and Kemp, 2023). Ideally, all performance management procedures should be documented, and measured, for instance, through the application of validated tools (e.g., balanced scorecards). These tools can be used to audit, to monitor, control and/or to determine individual results (e.g., per each work), team results (e.g., working groups) or organizational results (e.g., per department). Thus, the results/outputs from workers, teams, or organizations need to be collected, analyzed, and reformulated (if necessary) to fulfil or improve the organization's strategy (Bourne et al., 2018; Kaplan et al., 1996).