BSC’s Perspectives Ranking towards Organizational Performance: An Empirical Study Performed with Portuguese Exporters

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Introduction – contribution of the article

The article sets out to investigate whether the importance of financial perspectives, customer perspectives, internal perspectives, learning perspectives, and growth perspectives and the critical factors associated with these assigned as assigned to them by organisations differ whether the organisation uses the BSC or not. A Liker-scale questionnaire was distributed to 250 respondents and 106 completed responses were received. Various in-depth statistical analyses were conducted, and analyses were performed to test four hypotheses with respect to the use of the BSC or not and within each the ambit of critical success factors and the said perspectives.

Points raised:

[1]     The abstract needs to be revised. Having read through the article I could see what it is that the researchers contributed, but the semantics of the Abstract are very unclear. At that point it makes it very hard to determine what the article is trying to achieve. 

[2]     Most references are very dated. These need to be addressed (kindly see elsewhere in my report).

[3] Lines 85 – 87: “However, although several organisations have successfully implemented the BSC, others have failed to do so (Ittner et al., 2003; Ittner & Larcker, 1998; Speckbacher, Bischof, 87 & Pfeiffer, 2003).” This makes a claim based on very dated references. What’s the latest state of affairs, e.g., the past 5 years? (see also point [2] above).

 

[4]     Similar for lines 91 – 92: “Many authors recognise that these themes still need empirical research (Bourne et al., 91 2002; Bourne & Neely, 2003; Norreklit, 2000; Speckbacher et al., 2003)”. You need to obtain and cite much newer references to justify the same state of affairs as back then.

[5]     The objectives (lines 97 – 101) are “loaded” in the sense that each objective addresses more than one aspect – I suggest the authors separate these out into more objectives, with each objective addressing fewer aspects. The research question (RQ) (lines 102 – 105) suffer from the same problem – separate it out into more RQs. Later on, you use the phrase “Critical success factors (CSFs)”, so I suggest you bring this phrase into your objectives and RQs.

[6]     Lines 128 – 130: You mention “traditional tools”. Which would these then be? You mention only the Tableau de Bord. Are there any others?

[7]     Lines 149 – 150 (somewhat pedantic comment): “The BSC analysis is very easy to interpret since it summarises the strategic objectives as well as the organisational strategy.” Suggestion: Avoid using the word “easy” since it creates the impression your research was easy.

[8]     Lines 166 – 167: What are the four perspectives? In the objective and RQ you mention financial, customer, internal, learning and growth which are five (5) perspectives? In Figure 1 you mention five slightly different perspectives? Kindly clarify at this point. Of course, further in the article it becomes clear (see also my follow-up point about Figure 1), yet it should be clarified at this point.

[9]     Linking with the above: In Figure 1 you probably exclude "Vision and Strategy" as one of the perspectives. This is OK, but then you must be clear about it, otherwise it’s confusing.

[10]  Figure 1 seems to be placed over another background logo/figure?

[11]  Lines 179 – 180: “immense information available: You may want to mention the Big Data (BD) challenge here and cite a recent BD reference.

[12]  Lines 191 – 199: Here you mention a host of other factors. Are these important to the analyses you are performing later? At this stage in the article, it’s not clear?

[13]  Lines 214 – 217: Please be clear on precisely what the “financial perspective” factors/items in your hypotheses are. E.g., all of Table 1 content? or just some of the items mentioned? Again, later in the article it becomes clearer what your variables are, yet you should clarify it much at this point.

[14]  Same with the other perspectives that follow in the other hypotheses. Exactly what are the “perspectives”? I guess what I’m saying is that the column demarcations of the tables are unclear/ambiguous. It is possible that the references you refer to had it like that, but it was then unclear in those cases as well, unless it had different purposes then. I think part of the issues I have with the above is that the headings of the tables are not clear. For example, precisely what are the “Factors” in each of the tables. Likewise, what are the specific “perspective(s)” in the tables as referred to in the hypotheses?

[15]  Amongst other, tables 8 and 9 shed some light on the above uncertainties WRT the table columns and headings, but it should be clarified earlier in the article. Maybe it would help if you explicitly refer to specifics in the questionnaire in Appendix 1.

[16]  Concern (datedness): The hypotheses and much of the statistical work that follows hinges on frameworks published in 1996 – 2007 articles (Kaplan & Norton). Have these frameworks not been updated and/or reworked during the past 15+ years? That said, there’s a later one: “In this sense, Jordan et al. (2015) identified some 314 performance indicators and critical factors which are shown in table 4.” (bottom of page 8, lines 314 – 315). But even this one is 7 years old?

[17]  Line 379: “quantitative methodology” Would this not actually be a research “choice”? Methodology is the overarching term to use, e.g., research methodology. Likewise, line 362: “approach” would instead be something like inductive/deductive.

[18]  Lines 400 – 401: Not sure what the norm is in your institutions. Would you need ethical clearance to conduct interviews? Also, what about ethical clearance to distribute the Likert-scale questionnaire? Kindly elaborate on these aspects.

[19]  Table 8, just below line 480: Kindly check: “Erro Padrão da Mé-dia”.

[20]  This discussions between lines 489 – 625 appear to be largely correct with respect to the statistical analyses performed but are very hard to follow by continuously looking back at the relevant tables. Consequently, I suggest the researchers summarise these discussions in the form of a set of tables to facilitate the discussions (i.e., improve the user experience of these discussions) at a high level, not excessive detail; otherwise, the same problem will manifest. The 2^nd paragraph on page 17 is especially hard to decipher.

End of Review.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for contributing to the improvement of our article. Your help has been fundamental in making this research better and with more quality.

Best Regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The publication provides an interesting approach to the topic. BSC belongs to an essential management tool. It is therefore necessary to conduct analyzes aimed at studying the impact of BSC on the parameters and functioning of the organization. The article may be published after taking into account the comments of the reviewer. In my opinion, it is worth making the following changes to improve the article:

1. Refine the text in relation to the editorial guidelines (especially the way of making references to the literature - it was probably planned after taking into account the comments of the reviewers, but it is worth remembering about it).

2. Separate parts related to the analysis of applications and discussions. Additionally, deepen the analysis - many variables and parameters were examined, so it is worth expanding the analysis.

3. Expand and deepen the discussion of research results with the analyzes of other authors.

4. Expand and detail the description of the methodology. It is worth changing the name to "Materials and methods". In addition, this part should also include the research goal (s), research problems. Statistical methods were also used in the analysis, each one should be briefly characterized and described, and how they were used. In addition, it is worth adding a diagram of the course of the study divided into stages (e.g. preparation, implementation, analysis of results) and taking into account the use of individual methods in them.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for contributing to the improvement of our article. Your help has been fundamental in making this research better and with more quality.

Best Regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the extensive revision.

All the best with your future research.

Kind regards.

 

Author Response

Dear editor,

Thanks for all your work.

We are happy to send you the article after review proposals from you and other reviewers.

Best Regards

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you - most of the previous comments have been implemented.

I think a combination of the results and discussion parts is acceptable.

However, the discussion itself needs to be supplemented. References to the analyzes of other authors are based on relatively old studies - e.g. 1996, 1999, 2001, 2004. The latest study is 2014. It is worth supplementing the discussion with the results of the latest research - publications from 2020-2022.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Many, many thanks for your excellent and important proofreading work.

We have added, as you requested, new and more recent bibliographic references. After all the reviewers' proposals, you can view these introductions in the revised article.

We are happy to send you the article after reviewing proposals from you and other reviewers.

Best Regards