Managing Value Creation within the Firm: An Examination of Multiple Performance Measures

Abstract

There has been an emphasis in recent years on understanding how value is created within the firm. To understand what drives value, managers must have in place performance measurement systems designed to capture information on all aspects of the business, not just the financial results. Many firms are implementing a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) performance measurement system that tracks measures across four hierarchical perspectives: learning and growth, internal business processes, customer, and financial perspectives. Although BSCs should ideally be tailored to each firm's unique strategy, evidence shows that managers tend to rely on generic measures, particularly as measures of the outcome of each perspective. We use cross-sectional data on seven archival measures from 125 firms over a five-year period to proxy for typical outcome measures of the four BSC perspectives. We find that a model that allows each outcome measure to be associated with outcome measures in all higherlevel BSC perspectives captures the value-creation process better than a relatively simple model that allows each measure to be a driver of only the next perspective in the BSC hierarchy. We also find differences in the relations among performance measures when firms implement a performance measurement system that contains both financial and nonfinancial measures versus one that relies solely on financial measures.