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Aim – This empirical study explores the association between competition, business strategy, and the uses of a multiple performance measurement system in Bangladesh manufacturing firms.

Design/methodology – The study uses a questionnaire survey of 50 manufacturing companies. Data were analyzed using multiple regression analysis and other descriptive statistics.

Findings – The results suggest that greater emphasis on multiple measures for performance evaluation is associated with businesses that are facing high competition. The practices of multiple performance measures are also significantly related to the types of business strategy being followed. Specifically, firms pursuing a prospector strategy have relied more on multiple performance measures to rate business performance than the firms pursuing a defender strategy.

Practical implications – The article notes that the designers of performance measurement systems need to consider contingent factors that affect an organizations’ control system.

Originality/value – Substantiating the connection between contingent variables and the use of multiple performance measures in manufacturing firms facilitate a better acceptance of firms’ tendency toward new measurement tools. The study contributes to the performance measurement and contingency literature since it presents empirical evidence of the state of multiple performance measures with organizational contingent variables using a developing country's manufacturing sector data.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the body of knowledge in the area of performance measurement systems, particularly the BSC framework, by investigating empirically the extent of multiple performance measures usage and their effects on the performance of Malaysian manufacturers.

The paper used a mail‐survey of companies listed in the Directory of the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM), year 2003. The FMM Directory provides a database of over 2,000 manufacturing firms of various sizes producing a broad range of products. The FMM Directory was utilized because it specifically covers manufacturers and manufacturing‐related services. A simple random sample of 975 companies located in West Malaysia was drawn. Companies with at least 25 employees and annual sales turnover of at least RM10 million were selected. A total of 120 usable responses were gathered and used in the data analysis.

The findings suggest that the use of non‐financial measures, particularly, internal business process and innovation and learning measures, appears to be important as it enhances firm performance. More interesting, the findings reveal that the use of multiple performance measures via overall BSC measures contributes to a more positive outcome.

The paper shows that the FMM Directory is not an exhaustive list, and may not represent the whole population of Malaysian manufacturers. The sample size is not overwhelming and confined to the manufacturing sector only. Furthermore, the use of cross‐sectional data could not find consistent association between non‐financial measures and future performance.

The paper shows that one important practical implication is for the designers of control and performance measurement systems to emphasize the use of multiple performance measures that are fundamental to the success of organizations.

In this chapter we develop a new approach, based on the identification of strategy classes, to study how firms face multiple demands. The procedure that we propose (called Relational Class Analysis) stems from an analysis of the similarity of associative patterns across multiple observable outcomes, which reflect the underlying set of choices firms make to similarly address demands. Empirically, the study of 18 financial and extra-financial performance outcomes for 3,655 firms shows the existence of three main strategic classes. Drawing on our analysis, we redefine strategy as the set of committed decisions undertaken to resolve trade-offs between multiple concurrent objectives and discuss the implications of our approach for eight core questions for strategy and organizational theory.

While it is well known that managers make scheduling decisions based on multiple objectives, the majority of sequencing research is directed towards single criterion assessments of scheduling performance. A preference value decision model approach for the selection of job shop sequencing rules using multiple performance criteria is presented. The model is general in nature and may be applied to any of a number of sequencing rules and performance measures. A case example is provided to illustrate the procedure.

The performance measurement literature suggests that companies should consider increasing the diversity of their performance measures to embrace both financial and non‐financial measures. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the use of multiple performance measures which includes both financial and non‐financial measures in evaluating subordinates' performance (reliance on multiple performance measures (RMPM)) affects their performance, or whether the effect is contingent on the specificity and difficulty of the goals contained in the measures.

A questionnaire survey to various functional managers within a single organization supported by interviews.

The effect of RMPM on subordinate managers' performance is contingent on goal specificity. However, the paper does not find the same results for goal difficulty. These findings are discussed within the context of the organization studied.

The samples are from a single organization. Further work would be needed to examine whether the results are generalizable into other organizations and/or settings.

The paper provides insight on how performance measures used to evaluate managers should be designed.

This paper contributes to the literature on supervisory evaluative style, performance measure diversity and goal‐setting theory.

Firm performance remains at the heart of strategic management. In the quest to refine the field’s contribution, Venkatraman and Ramanujam (1986) argued that reliance upon single measures of firm performance is risky and firm performance should be treated as a multidimensional construct. Subsequently, researchers have examined trends in firm performance measurement ever since. Over a decade since the last examination of this issue, this study aims to add to the ongoing conversation.

The authors investigated 1,972 research papers published in five premier management journals for the years 2015–2019 to determine if multidimensional measurement of firm performance has improved.

The findings suggest that approximately two-thirds of papers that measure firm performance are published using only a single measure of firm performance, and approximately three-fourths do not measure firm performance across multiple dimensions.

This study contributes to the literature by emphasizing the necessity to consider the dimensionality of firm performance, use multiple measures and consistently ground firm performance variables with theory – especially control variables – to keep firm performance as the focus of the strategy field. Evidence and implications are discussed and recommendations for researchers and reviewers are provided.

In the growing debate about designing new management control systems (MCS) to include stakeholder values, there has been little discussion about information overload. Stakeholder advocates call for including more environmental and related social disclosures but do not consider how information overload might impair the use and interpretation of corporate performance measures. As we know, shareholders and boards of directors are most concerned with market data such as earnings per share, dividend rates, and market value growth. In this chapter, we assert that management control system designers must consider information overload before expanding the MCS to include social and nonfinancial disclosures.

The paradox in expanding MCS is that demand for sustainability performance measures will likely result in overload for both information preparers and information users. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and similar sustainability disclosures are likely to overload MCS and overwhelm the readers and users by performance reports that include multiple dimensions.

CSR affects the design of companies' annual reports because stakeholders are increasingly concerned with how organizations address their social responsibilities and how they disclose their societal responses. Management accountants are accustomed to providing performance measures within an organization and MCS usually have an internal focus. CFOs are often not accustomed to balancing the needs of stakeholders with those of managers and owners. We suggest that companies and CFOs will face an information overload dilemma in making these determinations, and that users will be overloaded in sifting through the multiple dimensions of information that are increasingly being provided. We suggest that the bias toward financial performance measures will distort both the provision of relevant information and the use of sustainability performance measures. We modified the Epstein and Roy sustainability model (2001) to illustrate some of these potential impacts.

We note that the balanced scorecard (BSC) was developed as one such tool to reflect and communicate multiple measures. We summarize a previous study showing how managers ignored multiple performance measures in a performance scorecard study. We then relate our results to some of the information overload literature to support our suggestion that stakeholders will face many of the same information overload issues and constraints when using and processing social disclosures.

Our summary of the information overload literature results in a call for more interdisciplinary information overload research involving real-world contexts and tasks. We note that most of the extant information overload literature is restricted to discipline-based silo-oriented studies and to simplistic evaluations, brand identification, or forecasting tasks. Our study went into some depth to describe the business, its strategies and objectives, and a comparison of actual results to specific goals. As management control systems evolve or are designed to report sustainability data, the issues surrounding increasing complexity and information overload will become exponentially problematic. We suggest that future research also include consideration of information overload conditions facing preparers and disclosers of sustainability measures.

This paper aims to contribute industrial marketing literature by examining the relationship between market orientation and performance based on multiple perspectives and measures. Although the relationship between market orientation and firm performance has been examined in prior research a gap in the literature exists, as this relationship has not been examined from separate perspectives of managers, salespersons and customers. In addition to this gap in the literature, a further gap exists as these multiple assessments of market orientation have not been examined relative to both subjective and objectives measures of industrial firm performance.

The research is based on data obtained from 111 sales branches of a Fortune 500 industrial supplier.

The results indicate that managers, salespersons and customers all indicate a positive relationship between market orientation and perceived performance. Market orientation and actual branch performance were not related when assessed by any of the three respondent groups. Only salespersons were able to significantly relate perceived firm performance to actual performance.

These findings add a new dimensions to the existing stream of literature on the industrial marketing orientation and performance relationship.

These findings add new dimensions to the existing stream of literature on the industrial marketing orientation and performance relationship.

This study is an empirical investigation of the relationship between the use of 41 multiple performance measures (MPMs), including financial performance measures (FPM), non-financial performance measures (NFPMs) and organisational performance (OP) in Libya.

The results are based on cross-sectional questionnaire survey data from 132 Libyan companies (response rate 61%), which were obtained just before the so-called Arab Spring.

MPMs are used by both manufacturing and non-manufacturing companies. Libyan business organisations are more likely to use FPMs than NFPMs. However, these companies still rely more heavily on FPMs. The relationships between the use of NFPMs and OP and the use of MPMs and OP are positive and highly significant. The relationship between the use of FPMs and OP is positive but not significant.

The high power distance associated with the conservative, Libyan, Arab context will reinforce the tendency to use FPMs more than NFPMs. This may provide a performance advantage to those organisations which do adopt NFPMs.

Although there may be institutional barriers to the use of NFPMs in Libya, and other emerging markets, these are not insuperable and there is a payoff to their use.

No previous studies of emerging markets, such as the Middle East or North Africa, have looked at the relationship between OP and the adoption of such a large array of MPMs.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated dynamic model, based on empirical findings, which can be used in research centers for evaluating the performance of research projects by using multiple attribute utility theory.

In developing the model, the measures by which the performance of research projects could be evaluated are identified by Delphi method and group decision making. These measures are categorized into three general success factors of time, cost and quality. Then a multi‐attribute utility function is applied to integrate these dimensions to determine the utility resulting from the performance of the project.

Through literature review it is evident that some evaluation techniques such as checklists, scoring models, analytical hierarchy process and engineering economic techniques have been developed for evaluating performance of projects. The present model complements and improves upon the existing models.

The parameters of model are determined based on research center's policy but they may be changed for other research centers. So the model depends on the expert's view. The model is not considered advantageous in situations where project gets ahead of program.

The model is tested in an engineering research institute and the comparison is made with the results of the existing models.

The advantage of proposed model is its flexibility, dynamism and the capability to revise the model based on any changes in the objectives and policies of the research center.