Said et al. (2003) also examined the fit between operational and competitive circumstances
and firms’ choice of performance measures, as well as the performance effects of
including nonfinancial measures in compensation contracts. A notable advance over prior
studies is the use of a large sample (1,441 firm-years for firms using nonfinancial performance
measures in managerial bonus plans, matched against the same number of firm-years
for firms using exclusively financial measures). The results indicated that firms with a
greater quality focus made greater use of nonfinancial measures. Furthermore, consistent with the contingency-based approach to performance measurement, firms that relied on
nonfinancial measures either more or less than a benchmark model had lower performance.