Universities need ways to understand performance.

Research quality, student experience, teaching outcomes, grant income, and impact all matter, and higher education cannot simply abandon accountability because measurement can be uncomfortable.

But there is a problem when we treat performance measures as if they are neutral instruments. They are not. The measures universities choose, the way targets are communicated, and the consequences attached to them all shape how academics behave, how they relate to colleagues, and how they feel about their work.

So the question for universities should not only be whether a performance system produces useful information. It should also be what kind of academic culture that system produces.

Accountability can become insecurity

Across higher education, academics navigate overlapping expectations around research outputs, student evaluations, promotion, grant income, impact, and institutional priorities.

None of these are unreasonable in isolation. The difficulty arises when expectations are uncertain, shifting, or experienced as high stakes.

In research I conducted with 52 academics across 18 UK business schools, anxiety was the most prominent emotional response associated with performance measurement. Participants linked it to changing expectations, fear of missing targets, job insecurity, and pressure to publish in highly ranked journals.

What was striking was that the problem was often not the existence of a target itself. It was uncertainty about what counted as “good enough”, how performance would ultimately be judged and what the consequences of falling short might be. That uncertainty can turn accountability into continuous self-monitoring.

Academics compare themselves with colleagues who are publishing more, winning grants, receiving better student evaluations, or progressing more quickly. A metric may be designed to assess performance, but it can also create a persistent sense of falling behind.

Emotional effects are organisational, not just personal

If universities think of this only as a wellbeing issue, they risk missing what is happening organisationally.

Participants also described frustration, disappointment, feelings of inadequacy, depression, and emotional exhaustion, particularly after repeated rejection, negative evaluation, or a perceived lack of recognition. For some, failing to meet performance expectations was experienced not simply as a professional setback but as a judgement on personal worth.

Others spoke about disrespect, mistrust, and alienation. Monitoring, appraisal, and repeated check-ins could be experienced not as supportive management but as a signal that academics were not trusted to manage their own work.

There were physical consequences too. Participants reported fatigue, sleep disturbance, headaches, and other health effects alongside the cumulative pressure of publication expectations, promotion criteria, research funding, teaching measures, and workload.

These accounts do not mean every performance system will produce these outcomes. But they do suggest that the emotional consequences of management systems cannot be separated neatly from questions of organisational performance.

Performance systems change relationships

Perhaps the bigger issue is what happens between colleagues. Universities depend heavily on activities that are difficult to capture in individual metrics: mentoring, informal advice, intellectual generosity, sharing opportunities, reading a colleague’s draft and creating the trust that makes collaboration possible.

Highly individualised performance systems can work against those behaviours. When academics are continually compared through publications, grant income, student evaluations, and other indicators, colleagues can also become competitors. Participants described jealousy, reduced trust, limited willingness among some colleagues to share knowledge or provide support, and increasing social isolation. Work expectations also spilled into evenings, weekends, and family life.

A university can therefore record impressive individual outputs while simultaneously weakening the social conditions that make excellent academic work sustainable. If performance management rewards what is visible and individual while taking collegiality for granted, collegiality can become the thing that gets squeezed.

Success produces its own culture

The effects were not uniformly negative. A minority of participants found metrics motivating and believed that clear expectations could encourage higher standards.

My findings also suggested a divide between what I describe as “achievers” and “strugglers”. Those better able to navigate performance expectations, often more established academics, could take considerable pride in publications, citations, and professional standing. Social media can further amplify these visible markers of success.

For those struggling to satisfy the same metrics, particularly some early career academics, continual exposure to other people’s achievements could intensify feelings of inadequacy and exhaustion.

The answer is not to stop academics celebrating success. It is to recognise that systems centred heavily on visible individual achievement can encourage comparison and self-promotion as well as excellence.

Assess the culture that metrics create

None of this is an argument for abandoning performance measurement. Universities need accountability, and academics should expect their work to be evaluated. But performance systems should be judged by more than whether they generate numbers and differentiate performance.

Three questions would be a useful starting point.

Are expectations sufficiently transparent that staff understand what is valued and how decisions are made? Do academics have meaningful opportunities to shape and review the systems governing their work? And does the institution recognise contributions such as mentoring, citizenship, leadership, collaboration, and engagement rather than allowing a narrow set of outputs to dominate?

Universities routinely consider the intended outcomes of policies and management systems. They should pay equal attention to the cultures those systems create.

A performance system that raises measured output while weakening trust, collaboration, and wellbeing may be succeeding according to its own indicators while undermining the institution around it.

The challenge for higher education is therefore not to choose between accountability and academic wellbeing. It is to design accountability systems that recognise that sustainable performance is produced by people, relationships, and cultures – not by metrics alone.