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This chapter seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) use of practices for the purpose of organizational sustainability by highlighting the need for conducive performance measures and standards attached to NPO funding sources.

A review of literature for the UK Non-profit organization sector and NPO performance measures. The review structures literature as it relates to the non-profit sector and their relation to societal impact of human social service (HSS) non-profit organizations, non-profit performance measures, and processes of knowledge sharing in application of organizational evaluation.

This chapter provides a review of gaps in the literature referring suitable performance measurement and assessments suitable for the unique culture and approaches to performance measures of non-profit organizations. Future research implications suggest research in order to comprehend processes and procedures of performance measures inclusive of knowledge sharing and the processes of how non-profit learn, share, and evaluate internal and external to the NPO sector.

The value of this chapter is relevant for the public, government, and corporations to support efficient and effective ways in appropriating funds and defining successful NPO’s for external funders to invest.

The purpose of this paper is to apply Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger's service profit chain to a single retail service with a view to developing a better understanding of the performance linkages between employee perceptions and performance, customer perceptions and behaviour, and financial performance.

The research was based on the case study of a UK home improvement store chain. Measures of each of the variables in the service profit chain were analysed using Pearson's correlation coefficient, with a dataset based on 75 stores.

Although analysis of the performance relationships revealed many interesting correlations, the data lent little support for some of the expected linkages; in particular, the “satisfaction mirror” effect between employee and customer satisfaction and loyalty, and the link between customer loyalty and financial performance. The possible asymmetries and non‐linearity of certain performance relationships may also have added to the difficulty in applying the model to this organisation. Furthermore, the study revealed many performance linkages between variables which are not aligned in the service profit chain model.

The value of the paper lies in the conclusions directed at both practising managers and academics. It is contended that the service profit chain model cannot be applied generically to services but that managers should undertake the development of context‐specific models of their organisations. Unquestioning acceptance of Heskett et al.'s configuration of the service profit chain may indeed constrain managerial understanding of the complexities of business performance; whilst there is also a danger of applying a strait‐jacket to academic thinking on performance relationships and performance improvement.

To empirically study the performance of large retailers in terms of the strategic profit model and the retail performance index over time.

This study looks at how well the largest public US retailers performed financially from 1982 to 2001. Several measures are employed, including sales and profit growth, profit margins, asset turnover, return on assets, financial leverage, and return on net worth. The performance of Wal‐Mart is broken out.

As a group, the largest public US retailers have not performed very well across a number of measures. They have not been “high performers.” Wal‐Mart has outperformed other very large retailers for virtually every financial measure. It has been a “high performer” by not losing its edge as it has grown.

Only public retailers were included in the study. Retailers reported financial data using different fiscal years. The federal government converted its data from SIC to NAICS codes during the time frame of the study; the data were converted based on a model from Retail Forward.

As the largest firms seek to heighten their marketplace concentration, they have to be careful not to fall into a growth trap. They need to be more devoted to driving up their financial performance.

The paper reports the results of a comprehensive longitudinal study of the largest public retailers, and focuses on applying two under‐researched retail performance tools: the strategic profit model and the retail performance index.

Firm’s operating contexts and asymmetric perspectives of success versus failure outcomes are two essential features typically absent in research on firms’ implemented strategies. The study here describes and provides examples of formal case-based models (i.e., constructing algorithms) of firms implemented strategies within several of 81 potential context (task environments) configurations – large vs small, service vs production orientation, low vs high competitive intensity, low vs high technological turbulence, and ambiguous settings for each. The study applies the tenets of complexity theory (e.g., equifinality, causal asymmetry, and single causal insufficiency). The study proposes a meso-theory and empirical testing position for solving “the crucial problem in strategic management” (Powell, Lovallo, & Fox, 2011, p. 1370) – firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. A workable solution is to identify/describe implemented executive capability strategies that identify firms in alternative specific task environments which are consistently accurate in predicting success (or failure) of all firms for specific implemented capabilities/context configuration. The study shows how researchers can perform “statistical sameness testing” and avoid the telling weaknesses and “corrupt practices” of symmetric tests such as multiple regression analysis (Hubbard, 2015) including null hypothesis significance testing. The study includes testing the research issues using survey responses of 405 CEO and chief marketing officers in 405 Hungarian firms. The study describes algorithms indicating success cases (firms) as well as failure cases via deductive, inductive, and abductive fuzzy-set logic of capabilities in context solutions.

As public service deliverers, funded by public money and performing tasks on behalf of government, many non-profit organisations (NPOs) are under pressure to increase their performance. More and more NPOs have to prove they work efficiently, effectively and in line with the overall mission. As a result, the challenges these organisations are confronted with put pressure on their management. For NPOs, innovation and performance are managerial key issues. Ultimately, the question is what the factors are that lead to innovation and/or improved organisational performance in NPOs, given their important role in public service delivery, often acting as agents of government. For academics, this creates an ambitious research agenda. With a risk to oversimplify the picture, we could summarise this agenda as consisting of some crucial descriptive and explanatory questions. Major descriptive research questions concern the level of innovative behaviour of NPOs, their performance, and their organisational governance characteristics. In terms of explanations, there is a possible relationship between organisational governance features and organisational performance, between organisational governance features and innovation, and between innovation and organisational performance. In this chapter, we discuss the recent academic research concerning these issues, and, secondly, based on the assessment of this literature, we will propose some directions and challenges for such a research agenda.

This study aims to investigate the relative weight of financial and non-financial performance measures used to evaluate production managers (such as shop floor managers or foremen) in a modern manufacturing setting.

Using survey data from Japanese factories, the paper examines the association between the choice of profit, cost, and non-financial performance measures with two characteristics of manufacturing systems: interdependence and multi-tasking.

The results indicate that interdependence has a significant and positive association with the importance of profit information, while multi-tasking is associated negatively with the importance of profit information, and positively with non-financial information for performance evaluation.

In recent years, a significant shift has been observed in Japanese production management with many companies now focusing on profit information instead of cost information. For example, the past studies show that large Japanese manufacturing companies are now using micro-profit centres and include profit information when evaluating factories. However, little empirical evidence is available on performance measurement at the shop floor foreman level, and even less is known about the importance of profit information in the evaluation of these lower level managers.

It appears that the role of money as a motivator in work tasks has increased substantially during the past decade. This applies particularly to managerial and executive grades. First, why this might be the case is discussed. Second, the literature on the early research into the pay of the chief executive is reviewed, since a major point of consideration was the relationship between CEOs′ pay and firms′ performance. Third, the evidence on profit sharing and company performance is examined, as it appears that this form of linkage has increased in the last decade, particularly for managerial and executive grades. Fourth, a model for testing the relationship between managerial remuneration and the performance of the firm is presented. This model is then applied to internal and external measures of performance for a sample of 147 firms in the UK electrical and office equipment industry for the year 1987, and conclusions are drawn.

In many countries, governmental organizations decentralized their organization structures, leading to an increased relevance of performance information. This paper identifies two approaches to measure performance in the not‐for‐profit sector: an output‐focused and a throughput‐focused approach. Furthermore, the paper sets a contingency framework concerning the applicability of these two approaches. The two most important contingent variables, i.e., whether output can be identified and whether activities are repetitive, determine the possibilities to apply the two approaches. If it is possible to apply both approaches, the ambiguity of organizational objectives, the hierarchical position of information users and the relevance of efficiency and quality are additional contingent variables that influence the approach to assess performance. Finally, the paper identifies how the approach to measure performance relates to management control types. If none of the two approaches is applicable, the organization has to rely on a management control type without an explicit system to measure performance, i.e., political or judgmental control. Routine or trial‐and‐error control fit with both approaches to measure performance. Expert and intuitive control are control types that rely on output‐based approaches to measure performance.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between human resource attributes and the operating performances of accounting firms by sampling data from the 2012-2013 Survey Report on Accounting Firms, as compiled by the Financial Supervisory Commission in Taiwan.

Multiple regression analysis is conducted to measure operating performances with various measurements, such as operating profits and business diversification. The independent variables include male to female ratio, percentage of senior executives, percentage of employees with higher education backgrounds, organizational vitality, human resource diversity, percentage of employees with certified public accountant (CPA) qualifications and human resource costs (HRCs). The control variables are the firm history, market shares and ownership structures since the inception of the firms.

The empirical results regarding the operating profits model suggest that the higher the male to female ratio, the percentage of employees with higher education backgrounds, organizational vitality, human resource diversity, percentage of employees with CPA qualifications and HRCs, the greater the operating profits. Meanwhile, the findings regarding the business diversification model indicate that the higher the male to female ratio, percentage of senior executives and human resource diversity, the greater the business diversification.

It is intended that the research findings can assist the management of accounting firms to understand the human resource attributes critical to operating performances, which will help to enhance the competitiveness of employees, mitigate the operating risks and improve the operating performances of the firms.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that entrepreneurs are motivated not only by the desire to maximize profits but also by the desire for mastery. It then attempts to analyze the implications of mastery seeking for the economics and politics of government privileges and favors for businesses.

Using the existing psychological literature on mastery as motivation the paper first attempts to conceptualize how the desire for mastery manifests itself in the context of entrepreneurship. Next, it attempts to clarify the implications of this for the existing literature on the effects of government policies promoting cronyism.

The paper argues that in business mastery involves producing a good product or service, and validation of the performance occurs via the choices of sovereign consumers. Mastery is thus achieved through participation in a process of competition that is free from government favors. Given that crony polices can disrupt the consumer choice process and consequently the validation of performance, they can therefore affect the types of individuals who become entrepreneurs, with a high level of government intervention pushing success seekers to pursue mastery in other life endeavors, with adverse implications for innovation and growth in the economy.

The exploration of implications of a plausible but underexplored motive for entrepreneurs and the interaction between this motive and the effects of various policies fostering cronyism or rent seeking are potential contributions of the paper.