The Problems of Organizational Performance, its Determinants and the Means of its Measurement : A Holistic and Multicriterial Perspective

The problems of organizational performance have been perceived during the last decades as an important element in managing organizations and evaluating process outcomes. Nowadays, all high performance organizations are interested in developing effective performance measurement systems and the concept appears early as a categorical imperative in almost all the human spheres of activity. In the field of organization, the slogan today is incisive: you get what you measure and you can't really manage a project unless you measure it. Consequently, firms must measure their performance in order to make good business decisions and ultimately, to give life to their mission, vision and strategy, and to increase their competitive advantage in the era of globalization. Insofar as a psychic representation makes possible a perception of reality (such as quality, effectiveness, efficiency, productivity), the performance measurement terminology has a subjective dimension. This undoubtedly explains the fruitfulness and richness of the critical reflexions on this concept, and the increasing variety of a certain number of tools and instruments which propose to measure it. Moreover, the debates between supporters of political, economic and social approaches continue to rage. This paper partly examines these various approaches and suggests that what has done much harm to the issue of organizational performance is less its polysemous and ambiguous character than the prevalence of a unidimensional approach that has been largely inspired by classical economic theories. Consequently, we propose here a holistic approach which recognises the need for managers to look at more than simply the financial and economic dimensions of organization, and which also considers business processes, human resource management, partners, customers and people. ISBN-2-89524-186-4