A relação entre estrutura, composição e processos dos conselhos superiores e o desempenho das instituições públicas federais de ensino superior brasileiras

Abstract

The relationship between governance and organizational performance is a recurring theme in the literature, so, studies that seek to relate aspects of the collegiate responsible for the strategic direction of organizations and their performance are common. Despite the valuable contributions of these studies, this relationship has usually been analyzed in the light of theoretical frameworks developed considering the characteristics of publicly traded private companies in North America and Europe. Priority has also been given to the use of unique theoretical perspectives, which alone cannot cope with the complexity observed in the reality of organizations, especially public ones. Thus, the objective of this research is to identify the relationship between the structure, composition and processes of governing boards of the Brazilian federal public higher education institutions and the performance of these institutions. Given the peculiarities of these institutions and their context, this research is developed in the light of a multiparadigm perspective, which considers the complexity and specificities of the analyzed organizations. For this purpose, references about Organizational Governance and Organizational Performance Assessment are used. In order to carry out the inferences, initially a survey was implemented with public agents of federal public higher education institutions in order to identify the key covariates in the relationship between governance and performance. Then, the data was collected from diverse documentary sources, such as normative acts, minutes, attendance lists of superior councils and databases of government bodies. The resulting panel brings data from the period 2010 to 2019 per institution per year, and the inferences are made using the systemic GMM technique. The results demonstrate that there is a statistically significant relationship between the structure, composition and processes of governing boards of the Brazilian federal public higher education institutions and their performance. Analyzed together, the results indicate that smaller boards, more committees linked to the boards, lower proportions of external members and more meetings are associated with better performances. The relationship between the size of the board of directors and performance and the relationship between the number of board meetings and the performance of institutions also showed a statistically significant non-linear relationship. When analyzing the results by group of institutions, on the one hand, Federal Universities showed a significant relationship between smaller boards and better performances, and greater numbers of meetings and better performances, corroborating elements of Agency Theory, Stakeholders Theory, Theory of Democratic Perspective and Resource Dependency Theory. On the other hand, the Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology and the Federal Centers of Technological Education showed a significant relationship between smaller boards and better performances, a greater number of c...