article · Strategy and Leadership
Research in Ghanaian public universities reveals how complex public institutions organise agency governance alongside managerial control to resolve accountability challenges. The investigation identifies two distinct but complementary governance dimensions: agency governance mechanisms, which include performance incentives, appraisal, staff development, and audits, and managerial control mechanisms, such as leadership rotation, oversight reviews, and monitoring managerial conduct. Although performance appraisal and oversight practices are widely established across the institutions examined, performance-based incentives remain less developed. Effective governance arrangements require alignment between these two sets of controls, ensuring that oversight functions work in harmony with staff development and appraisal systems. Maintaining credibility across institutional systems ultimately depends on how well these mechanisms are coordinated and tailored to specific institutional contexts to balance operational autonomy with public accountability.
Public universities must balance professional independence with transparent stewardship of public resources. Clarifying how oversight tools and staff development incentives work together helps governing councils and sector regulators design balanced oversight structures, ensuring that public resources are managed responsibly without suppressing the autonomy necessary for complex institutions to function effectively.
The findings provide a diagnostic governance framework that could be adapted into management tools or consultancy services for university governing councils, senior academic leaders, and higher education regulators. Given that the work presents empirical survey and interview findings rather than an applied commercial product, it represents early-stage conceptual research that would require operational development into software or structured advisory toolkits prior to practical organisational adoption.
AI-generated from the published abstract. Always read the original work before citing.
Purpose This study examines how agency governance and managerial control mechanisms are perceived and organized within complex and hybrid institutions, using Ghanaian public universities as the empirical setting. Drawing on agency theory, it explores how alignment-oriented mechanisms, including incentives, appraisal and staff development, coexist and complement oversight-oriented mechanisms, such as auditing, leadership review and monitoring of managerial conduct, in addressing agency risks and accountability challenges. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional concurrent mixed-methods design combining survey data from governance actors with semi-structured key informant interviews in Ghanaian public universities. Descriptive statistics and exploratory principal component analysis identified the underlying dimensions of governance practices, while thematic analysis offered their institutional interpretation and application. Findings The analysis revealed two complementary governance dimensions: agency governance mechanisms, comprising performance incentives, appraisal, audit and staff development, and managerial control mechanisms, encompassing leadership rotation, oversight reviews and the monitoring of managerial conduct. While appraisal and oversight practices were widely embedded, performance-based incentives were comparatively less developed. Interview evidence further suggested that the perceived coherence and credibility of governance arrangements depend on the coordination and contextual fit of these complementary mechanisms. Research limitations/implications The study has some limitations that create opportunities for further research. For instance, its cross-sectional design captures perceptions at one point in time and cannot establish causal relationships or the long-term consequences of governance reforms. Its focus on Ghanaian public universities also limits generalization across countries, sectors and institutional forms. Practical implications The study provides a diagnostic framework for governing councils, senior leaders and regulators to design governance systems that balance managerial autonomy with accountability through appropriate combinations of alignment-oriented and oversight-oriented mechanisms. Social implications By strengthening understanding of governance design in professionally autonomous and publicly accountable institutions, the study offers insights that may support more transparent stewardship of public resources and informed institutional decision-making. Originality/value The study extends agency-governance scholarship by identifying a two-dimensional governance architecture in complex and hybrid institutions. Rather than viewing incentives and monitoring as isolated controls, it demonstrates their complementary roles in governance design and provides contextually grounded evidence from Ghanaian public universities that can inform governance research and practice in comparable public-sector settings.
This page summarises published work. The authoritative version sits with the publisher.
DOI: 10.1108/sl-02-2026-0088
Is something wrong with this record? Report it or request removal.
Discussion
Have you built on this work, tried to replicate it, or seen it applied in practice? Share what you know. Verified researchers and MARATTO™ domain experts can open a discussion, and any member can reply. Contributions are reviewed before they appear.
No discussion yet. Open the first thread.
New to MARATTO™? Create a free account.
