Relative Weighting of Common and Unique Balanced Scorecard Measures by Knowledgeable Decision Makers

Prior research has found that decision makers with limited experience in using the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) ignored measures that reflect the unique strategy of a business unit and based their performance evaluations solely on measures common across units. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether decision makers who have had training and experience in designing BSCs exhibit the same behavior. Results of an experiment show that decision makers who are knowledgeable about the BSC attended to both common and unique measures, but placed greater emphasis on the former. These results hold in both a performance evaluation judgment and in a bonus allocation decision. We attribute these results to the knowledge participants acquired through classroom training on the design of the BSC, but cannot rule out an alternative explanation that our results differ from previous research because participants in our study were undergraduate accounting and information systems majors, rather than M.B.A. students.