Research performance and bureaucratization within public research labs

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between bureaucracy and research performance within Public Research Bodies. The research methodology is applied on a sample of 100 interviewed belonging to 11 institutes of National Research Council of Italy. The main finding is that within Italian Public Research Council there is academic bureaucratization that reduces performance and efficiency of institutes. In fact, institutes have two organizational behaviours: high bureaucracy – low performance and low bureaucracy – high performance. These bureaucratic tendencies are also present in other countries and particularly: the public research labs have an academic bureaucratization because of administrative burden necessary to the governance of the structures whereas the universities have mainly an administrative bureaucratization generated by the increase of administrative staff in comparison with researchers and faculty.