Causal Implications of Performance Management for Strategic Control

In contrast to conventional concepts of management accounting, which are limited to measuring the value realization of firms, the research field of performance measurement and management explicitly focuses on the managerial process of creating value. This process should be analyzed and subse-quently reconstructed in the form of cause-and-effect relationships. Such relationships consist of causes, effects and causal attributions. In management science cause-and-effect-relationships can not be detected and identified as “ontological truth”. They can only be reconstructed on the basis of individual knowledge and individual decisions on the explanation power of available statistical data. Causal enlargement of the value creation task - as induced by the concept of performance measurement and management - affects the function of strategic control. Its causal reinterpretation requires generating causal information and reconstructing cause-effect relationships underlying the strategic management process. The adequacy of these relationships should be systematically reflected within the framework of a meta-control, which is developed as a subfunction of strategic control in the following. Meta-control can protect strategic management against control deficits of the classical single loop and double loop learning. By implementing a meta-control, possible misinterpretations of the causal relevance of events and circumstances, e.g. based on logical implications or spurious correlations, can be reduced. With such a support the efficiency and effectiveness of performance measurement and management can be ensured