Consensus and Link Structure in Strategic Performance Measurement Systems : A Field Study

For a strategy to be effective it must be communicated and widely understood throughout the organization. Our study addresses which of two Strategic Performance Measurement Systems (SPMSs) approaches is more successful at communicating strategy and generating consensus on strategy among managers: (1) the BSC, which makes explicit the links among measures and categories in a hierarchical mode, and (2) an alternative SPMS design, which splits measures into financial and non-financial, but lacks this hierarchical structure of links. We conducted a field experiment in a savings bank and monitored two groups of middle managers working with each of the two SPMS designs. Our results show that (i) middle managers treated with the BSC exhibit a statistically significantly greater effect regarding consensus with respect to top management than those treated with the alternative SPMS, (ii) this increased consensus is more pronounced as we move down the list of the BSC perspectives, where the majority of non-financial and long term measures are found; and finally (iii) some of the managers treated with the non-linked SPMS experience a loss in consensus. The implications for the SPMS design process are: (1) the reporting of the performance measures links in a hierarchical mode matters when it comes to designing an effective strategy communication device, (2) the dispersion in managers' interpretation of the strategy generated by lacking a linked structure is greater than the tension created by confronting managers' views with the disclosed link structure