Institutional responsibility vs individual responsibility: ethical issues in the management of research performance

Universities experience a myriad of transformations due to the challenging environment. The confrontation of institutional and individual interests in the management of research performance is one of them. The imperative of responsibility is under the spotlight of discussion in terms of what our actions bring in improving the management of research performance, what raison d’être make it sophisticated. Adapting the main arguments of normative stakeholder theory we expose a particular attention to the ethical issues of institutional and individual responsibilities in the management of research performance. From a method perspective, academics were interviewed using semi-structured questions. The results of the research show that the non-functionality reasons of the responsibility of the university and academic derive from the incompatibility of interests and poorly developed culture of responsibility, particularly in the management of research performance from the ethical point of view; however, the study’s findings do not suggest how to measure the degree of impact on synergy of interests.