Summary on Wong-On-Wing's Paper

This study examined the effectiveness of a de-biasing mechanism for increasing raters' awareness of the quality of strategy as a potential determinant of divisional performance and hypothesized that individuals in the top-manager role do not take into account strategy effectiveness unless they are explicitly required to do so, using 63 evening MBA students provides support for the hypotheses. Research focused on problems of raters' selective attention, posited that the above-noted tendency to overlook the validity of the causal links between driver and outcome measures of the BSC is a potential source of conflict between top management and divisional managers, and that discrepancies in performance ratings between raters and ratees may result from top management's failure to consider the quality of its chosen strategy when evaluating divisional managers' performance. The study assessed the extent to which, when using the BSC, divisional performance evaluation differs between individuals who adopt the perspective of top management and those who assume the role of divisional managers to establish the existence of a bias. Then the effectiveness of a mechanism for reducing top management's bias and disagreement in performance appraisal between the two perspectives were tested. The test increased the rater's awareness of the quality of top management's strategy in influencing divisional performance by requiring an explicit assessment of the role of strategy quality in determining divisional performance prior to performance evaluation. The study employed a 2(role)*2(assessment)*2(store) design. Role and assessment were between-subjects factors. Store was a within-subjects factor. Findings suggested the unique features of the BSC do not significantly reduce selective attention bias that presumably leads to conflict between top management and divisional managers and also a means to mitigate the observed bias and the conflict and tension between top management and divisional managers. One source of the disagreement in performance ratings appears to be top management's insufficient attention to the quality of its strategy in evaluating divisional manager performance, and in the context of poor divisional performance, it may be possible to reduce top management's bias by requiring an assessment of the influence of strategy quality on divisional performance.

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