Mediating effects between perspectives in strategy maps

Many researchers have highlighted the importance of strategy maps for improving organizational performance and providing an entire organization with a cognitive representation of its strategic objectives. However, arguing that strategy maps do not assign weight to each perspective, other researchers have generated weighted strategy maps and used various optimization models to highlight the most important perspective. In this study, I argue that organizations should understand all the causal links in a strategy map and explore paths toward improvement rather than focusing on just one perspective. To that end, I analyse all the causal relationships in the strategy map developed for a major postal service in Saudi Arabia and identify two principal mediating relationships: (1) the relationship between the learning and growth perspective and the customer perspective as mediated by the internal business process perspective and (2) the relationship between the internal business process perspective and the financial performance perspective as mediated through the customer perspective.