A note on the judgmental effects of the balanced scorecard's information organization

Abstract

We examine judgmental effects of the balanced scorecard's organization. The balanced scorecard contains a large number of performance measures divided into four categories. We examine whether the scorecard's organization results in managerial performance evaluation judgments consistent with a recognition of the potential relations (i.e. nonindependence) of measures within a category. Supporting this idea, we find that performance evaluations are affected by organizing the measures into the balanced scorecard categories when multiple below-target (or above-target) measures are contained within a category but that evaluations are not affected when the above/below-target measures are distributed across the scorecard's four categories.