Previous research in the areas of institutional quality assessment and also total quality management has paid little attention to the role of cognition and focused more on how to create better evaluation systems or how quality programs improve organizational performance. In this dissertation, I have built on previous research on organizational change and cognition to shed new light on quality assessments in universities.
Within the context of periodical program quality evaluations in universities, I assessed the effects of several antecedents on faculty perceptions of evaluations' legitimacy and significance, and tested their mediating role in the formation of faculty attitudes towards a future re-evaluation. I found that faculty identification with their program led them to rate the legitimacy and significance of evaluations more highly. In addition, faculty who belonged to the humanities and social sciences were more likely to perceive evaluations as legitimate than were faculty in the technical and natural sciences. The fidelity of the past evaluation to the model developed by the Evaluation Agency did not have any effect on faculty perceptions of evaluations. Perceptions of the legitimacy and significance of evaluations partially mediated the effect of identification with the program on attitude towards a future re-evaluation, although in the case of legitimacy this mediation was only marginally significant, and perceived legitimacy moderated the impact of perceived significance on attitude towards a future re-evaluation. I conclude that faculty perceptions of evaluations and their attitude towards them depend on their level of identification with the program under evaluation.
This research contributes to the extant literature on quality evaluations. First, it shows that faculty attitudes towards a future re-evaluation are partially mediated by their perceptions of evaluations' significance and more weakly by their perceptions of evaluations' legitimacy. Second, faculty identification positively affects their perceptions of program evaluations and their attitude towards a future re-evaluation. Third, it shows that the fidelity of the last evaluation process to the Evaluation Agency model does not affect faculty perceptions of evaluations. Finally, my study indicates that faculty perceptions of evaluations' legitimacy and significance interact to shape faculty attitudes towards a future re-evaluation.
