Notably, these performance effects diverged from those of Ittner, Larcker, and Randall
(2003) where negative deviations from the benchmark had no detectible effect and positive
deviations were associated with higher performance. However, Said et al. (2003) only used
crude indicators (either a dummy variable or the total weight) to reflect a firm’s use or
nonuse of nonfinancial measures and, hence, like the other studies of quality initiatives,
they did not distinguish among different types of nonfinancial performance measures.