多业务单元业绩评价中公司高管认知偏差研究——BSC实验研究的证据

The Study on the Cognitive Bias of Company Executives in the Performance Evaluation for Multiple Business Units——Evidences From a BSC Experimental Study

BSC(平衡计分卡)不仅是一个多重业绩评价体系,而且是一个有效的战略管理工具。但以往研究发现,公司高管在运用BSC评价业务单元业绩时,赋予共性指标更高的权重,而忽视对独特指标信息的使用,损害了BSC的潜在有用性。本文提出了两种减轻共性指标偏差的措施,即改进战略表述并增进评价者对业务单元战略和独特指标的理解,以及运用分解评价方式并要求证明评价合理性,以激发评价者的认知努力。本文开展了一项实验研究检验这两种措施的效果,实验结果表明,不管是第一种措施即改进战略表述,还是第二种措施即改变业绩评价方式,均使得两种指标(共性指标与独特性指标)的权重差异显著降低,从而进一步说明了两种措施在一定程度上确实缓解了高管认知偏差即共性指标偏好现象。

Since the 80s of the 20th Century, major changes have occurred in enterprise business environment and management manners, which make increasingly apparent the limitation of the traditional performance measure- ment system based on financial measures. For this reason, many academics and practitioners made great efforts to develop new performance evaluating measures. There are two main ideas on the exploration of improving the per- formanee evaluation. The first way is to use new financial measures such as EVA reflecting economics income, and the other way is adding nonfinaneial measures being forward-looking and reflecting companies＇ core competence to financial measures. EVA can reveal enterprises＇ capability creating the value added and stockholder wealth, but still can＇t overcome the inherent defects of the financial indicators. The Balanced Scorecard （BSC） advocates the combi- nation of nonfinancial measures and financial measures and the use of multiple performance measures, evaluating companies＇ business performance in the round from four different and interrelated aspects including financial, cus- tomer, internal process, learning and development dimensions, thus overcoming effectively the shortcoming of the tra- ditional performance evaluation. Meanwhile, the BSC translates the strategic goals into a series of specific perform- ance evaluation measures, helping all departments and employee understand and complement the business strategy better. Hence, not only is BSC an all-sided performance evaluation system, but also an effective strategy complemen- tation tool. Since its creation, BSC has been widely used in more and more companies. After World War II, enterpri- ses around the world expanded their scale rapidly and formed a lot of diversified and multinational large companies or enterprise groups. In this case, decentralized management based on the division structure became the main form of diversified companies to manage their internal organizations. Decentralized management authorizes each business u- nit manager the right of decision making according to its product and marker features. Doing this can improve largely the marker responding speed and decision-making effectiveness, and fully mobilize the enthusiasm and creativity of business unit managers. On the other side, decentralized management aggravates the extent of information asymmetry between upper and lower managers, making the principle-agent problem more prominent. Evaluating the operating performance of business units is an important means to promote business unit managers adopting decisions and be- haviors in line with company entire interests and lower agency costs. The Balanced Scorecard （BSC） is not only a multiple performance measurement system, but also an effective strategy management tool. However, prior studies found that superiors assign significantly higher weights to common measures, and ignore using the information contained in unique measures when they evaluate the performance of business units using BSC, thus impairing the potential usefulness of BSC. This study propose two ways of alleviating the common measures bias, that is, improving strategy representation to enhance evaluators, understanding of busi- ness strategy and unique measures, and adopting a disaggregated evaluating pattern with requirement to justify per- formance evaluation so as to stimulate evaluators, cognitive effort. We carry an experimental study to examine the ef- fectiveness of the two ways, Results of the experimental study confirm the existence of the common measures bias, and suggest that either improving strategy representation or changing performance evaluating pattern and requirement significantly increases the weights evaluators assign tire bias. to unique measures, therefore alleviating the extent of the cogni-tire bias.