The Effect of Judgmental/Subjective Measures on Implementing Balanced Scorecard in Bahrain Firms

Abstract

Very little attention has been paid to study the judgmental effects of the balanced scorecard (BSC) in the developing countries, particularly in the Gulf area. This paper analyzes survey data from forty Bahrain firms in order to examine the extent to which these firms use of judgmental/subjective measures in evaluating their performance. The findings reject the null hypothesis and report statistically significant differences between Bahrain firms in using judgmental, /subjective measures in their balanced scorecards. However, data are analyzed by Paired t tests and ANOVA; significant differences are found between both types of firms with and without subjective measures in the use of BSC, particularly in cost measures and internal process measures.  Furthermore, the study reports various types of measures have different impacts on the performance evaluation in these firms.

Keywords: balanced scorecard, performance measurement, subjective measures.