organization gain insight into issues top management had not been aware of. This
seems to be consistent with the expected benefit of developing participation as
discussed by Kaplan and Norton (1996, p. 252). The finding also shows that
developing, monitoring and rewarding the non-financial aspects of performance was a
challenge. This can be seen in the mean scores of the items ranked in the 3, 5, 6 and 8th
positions. The items relating to the development of a causal model of the strategy
indicates that developing the model was not easy and required many assumptions to
be made. However, the item ranked in the 25th position shows that the respondents did
not feel that developing the causal model was simply guess work.
The mean score for these problems was compared between those who developed a
causal model of their strategy and those who did not. Table VI presents this
comparison. Items where the mean score for both categories is less than 3 are excluded
from this table since these are not rated as important problem by the respondents. The
mean scores in the table shows that BSC adopters who did not develop a causal model
of their strategy had more difficulty in developing non-financial measures (item 5) and
in cascading their scorecard to lower levels (item 7), faced a lack of the enthusiasm for
the BSC program (item 18), developed performance monitoring that was more focused
on financial measures (item 20) and tend to see the development of a causal model of
the strategy as more of a guesswork (item 21) who BSC adopters that developed a
causal model of their strategy.
Those who did not develop a causal model also perceived that they were better able
to resolve all contradictions in the performance measures develop (item 12) but found
that doing so was not easy (item 14) compared to those who developed a causal model.
Those who did not develop a causal model consider the inability to track non-financial
measures (item 6) more of a problem than those who developed a causal model. The
data also indicates that organizations that developed a causal model of their strategy
were better able to gain consensus among their managers when translating their