Unpacking Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) performances through the institutional logics lens

In the current knowledge-based economy, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are called to play different interconnected roles related to triple university missions. Alongside the two traditional missions of teaching and research, HEIs have experienced the emergence of the so-called “third mission”, which sees HEIs as knowledge-based agents part of ecosystems of public institutions, companies and citizens oriented to coknowledge creation. Finding a balance between the traditional missions and the third mission can be a serious challenge. For this reason, HEIs need to revise their objectives, strategies and performance indicator systems to plan, monitor and assess their social, cultural, and economic impact. Actually, there is no shared approach (and related KPIs) to assess in an univocally and standardised manner the performance of HEIs, in order to effectively reflect the whole range of academic missions, by reducing the possible tensions between them created at various organizational levels. Thus, the authors decided to carry out a qualitative inductive study based on the institutional logics perspective to: i) analyse how HEIs performances are measured, ii) to improve university performance measurement systems and iii) to mitigate the tensions within and among the different missions and the logics behind them.