BSC’s perspectives ranking towards organizational performance: an empirical study performed with Portuguese exporters

Abstract

Bearing the growing competition between organisations in mind, managers are focused on keeping on with the search for strategic alignment and performance monitoring. The literature has shed much light into the field of Management but a guide to monitor the defined strategy via Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is still lacking. Few studies have made their focus the question of which perspectives are the most relevant; it is therefore likely that there are different importance rankings between organisations with and without BSC. Highlighting the need to bring insight into this research field concerning the organizational performance measurement of the BSC, quantitative research was performed, to analyse the different rankings of the four perspectives, comparing organisations with and without BSC. The sample was composed of 107 out of the 250 major export organisations of Portugal. The outcomes confirm that the most relevant perspective is indeed the financial perspective, followed by the customer perspective, a finding unanimous in both types of organization (with and without BSC). For organizations without BSC, in third place stands the internal perspective, but, contrastingly, it comes after learning and growth perspective for organisations with BSC. The perspective of learning and growth differs in its rankings between organisations with and without BSC, as it shows up at third position for organizations with BSC, and at the fourth (last) position in organizations without BSC. This research has relevant outcomes for both managers and academia, as it is still a fertile ground, as it guides managers to identify the importance assigned by major exporters to different perspectives, in order to link its indicators. Despite having different levels of importance assigned to the third and fourth perspective, BSC is known and regarded as a meaningful management tool, even by managers who do not have BSC implemented. It conceivably still has growing possibilities in several activity areas.