ACADEMIA Letters The relationship between performance indicators and executives’ remuneration in the South African higher education sector M.J. Maleka C.M. Schultz Abstract Executive remuneration is a complex topic. Executives (vice chancellors) in the higher edu- cation sector serve the interests of many stakeholders such as students, unions, management, community and government. In the main, vice chancellors drive the interest of their major stakeholder, which is the government. They do this by ensuring that their academic institu- tions produce a workforce needed by the labour market, implement transformation, produce research that addresses societal problems and is published in high-impact journals, and have high graduate employability rates. In addition, executives must ensure that the institutions they lead are fnancially sustainable. The major fnancial sources are tuition and publication fees and third-stream income (i.e. ofering short learning courses). It can be averred that the performance indicators which lead to executives’ remuneration are not purely fnancial. This article ends by proposing that future research should be conducted to determine how execu- tives’ performance indicators are to be weighted as compensational factors within the context of South African universities. Keywords: Agency theory, executive salary, South African universities, sales and en- rolled students Academia Letters, May 2021 Corresponding Author: M.J. Maleka, malekam@tut.ac.za Citation: Maleka, M., Schultz, C. (2021). The relationship between performance indicators and executives’ remuneration in the South African higher education sector. Academia Letters, Article 526. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL526. 1 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0