On academic faculty evaluation systems - more than just simple benchmarking

Academic faculty evaluation is a yearly recurring part of the management process at most universities and it is an issue that is getting more and more attention, as universities all over the world are required to become increasingly accountable for their performance and efficiency to their stakeholders. Designing good academic faculty evaluation systems is not a simple problem because multiple issues and a large number of criteria should be considered and aggregate in a sensible way. To highlight the diversity of existing academic evaluation systems, we present and shortly compare real world systems from four universities in three different countries. We argue that as there are no best practices or guidelines available for academic faculty evaluation systems the topic requires more research attention from both the human resources management side and from the systems design side.