The relationship between structure, composition and processes of superior councils and the performance of Brazilian federal public institutions of higher education

Abstract

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. The variables used in this research are: for the structure, size and number of committees linked to the Boards; for composition, the proportion of external members; for processes, the number of meetings; and for performance, the General Index of Courses – IGC. 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. 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.