Which role for performance measurement systems in Higher Education? Focus on quality assurance in Italy

This work explores the role of voluntary quality assessments in Higher Education, underscoring their main features and potentialities, and showing that basic principles and guidelines can be customised in different countries or single institutions. In so doing, the article extensively presents an assessment project developed at the University of Siena, which represents a unique experience in Italy being the first integrated assessment of teaching and research quality of a whole University. The paper clearly highlights the relevance of quality assurance and performance measurement systems and the behavioural and organisational impacts they could provoke.