The decisions made in these steps don’t have to be done sequentially. The issues considered in each step are interdependent, and top management will often proceed through these steps several times before deciding on one or more accounting-based performance measures. At each step, the answers to the questions raised depend on top management’s beliefs about how well each measure fulfills the behavioral criteria of promoting goal congruence, motivating management effort, evaluating subunit performance, and preserving subunit autonomy (see Chapter 22).