IIMs' faculty worked up over appraisal scores

It's vacation time at the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) and the faculty members are calling each other to check the score. Just that the score has no correlation to the ongoing Indian Premier League cricket season.

Faculty members, instead, are curious about the new performance management system (PMS), where their teaching and non-teaching activities, including research and administration, are assigned scores for earning incentives. Last year, the institute had initiated a new system of setting targets, assigning scores and offering incentives, based on the scores for teaching and non-teaching activities.

Following suit, other institutes, including IIM-Calcutta, IIM-Trichy and IIM-Udaipur, have initiated various systems to measure their faculty's performance. At IIM-Lucknow, for instance, faculty members' salaries would now carry a variable pay component based on targets achieved, such as the number of research papers, number of teaching hours and quality of teaching methods, as well as participation in consulting projects, among others.

"The good thing is that I can aggregate my scores over three years. The downside is the stress that comes from wanting to know how much score one has earned. In academic institutes, non-teaching activities are part of one's job. Hence, a person can get tense over how much of each activity he has finished and how much incentive he is liable for," said a faculty member at IIM-Ahmedabad.

Moreover, it is perceived that Indian academicians, compared with their Western counterparts, are more inclined towards teaching than research, and, hence, such a system would add pressure on them.

"There is a general inclination towards teaching among Indian faculty members. That is the reason one needs to find encouragement for them to pursue or enhance research activities," said Janat Shah, director of IIM-Udaipur, which has a research incentive scheme. According to Shah, the institute also has a liberal faculty development allowance in place, to encourage faculty members to seek overall development.

Further, IIM-Calcutta says it is important to understand that all faculty members have a different set of strengths. All teachers need not be good researchers and a good researcher need not necessarily be a good teacher. Thus, faculty members at the institute decided to draw a three-year plan for themselves.

"We decided that a faculty member may be allowed to choose his or her mix and declare it for the next three years. What we have noticed is that when people declare their plans, sheer peer pressure makes them work to achieve it. No one else needs to judge them," said Ajit Balakrishnan, founder chairman and chief executive officer of Rediff.com and chairperson of IIM-Calcutta.

According to a director of one of the IIMs, in their recent meeting with the ministry of human resource development (MHRD), the latter had sought details on how the premier