Quality of the Tertiary Academic Leader-Exchange Relationship: Satisfaction, overload and the moderating effect of globally-used teaching, research and funding performance measures

The importance of teaching, research and funding performance measurement for academic leaders is instilled by tertiary education funding models globally. The objective of this research was to examine the leader-member exchange relationship between Faculty-level and subordinate department managers in a large sample of tertiary colleges and particularly to examine the moderating effect of multiple performance measurement use on job satisfaction and perceived work overload. The sample consisted of responses to a self-administered questionnaire from 209 subordinate head of departments across 112 tertiary education institutions in a single country. Previously validated leader-member exchange, satisfaction and workload survey items were used with confirmatory factor analysis of tertiary education-specific teaching, research and funding performance measures creating a new validated model for measuring performance in a tertiary education context. Based on moderating multiple regression results a significant difference was discovered for the effects of teaching and internal funding performance measurement compared to the imposition of research and external funding performance measurement. Hypothesis 1: The quality of LMX is positively associated with the HoDs’ job satisfaction Hypothesis 2: The quality of LMX is negatively associated with the HoDs’ perceived work overload Hypothesis 3: LMX quality has a negative relationship with perceived work overload and we hypothesize that MPM use will strengthen this negative relationship. Hypothesis 4: LMX quality has a positive relationship with job satisfaction and we hypothesize that MPM use will weaken this positive relationship.