acceptance. Senior management requires all the dealerships
to work according to these protocols.
The fifth change was that the dealership and department
managers now receive both financial and nonfinancial
performance information. The provision of
non-financial performance information used to be very
poor. The dealership and department managers now regularly
receive the profit-and-loss-account (of the dealership
or department that they manage, compared to the other
outlets in the Stam Groep), the results of customer satisfaction
surveys, and a balanced scorecard. The Stam Groep
has two balanced scorecards; one for sales and one for
after sales, both of which rank the dealerships according
to their performance. The new accounting information
that was introduced to the Stam Groep consisted of these
performance reports and the protocols for the operational
processes. The Stam Groep does not include bonuses in the
compensation package of its employees; this is consistent
with the compensation practices of the majority of the car
dealerships in the Netherlands (see Jansen et al., 2009).
The first three changes (the formation of the central
senior management, the reallocation of decision-making
authority and the standardization of the dealerships’ organization
structure) relate to the Stam Groep’s central
management and, consequently, affected all the dealerships
in the group in the same way. However, the
dealerships differ in the extent to which they have implemented
the fourth and fifth changes; i.e., the extent to
which the dealership managers use the protocols and
performance reports to control their department managers
and other employees. Some dealerships only use the
protocols and performance reports to account for their
performance to senior management. In other dealerships,
the dealership manager and the department managers