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1. Introduction
The balanced scorecard (BSC) developed by Kaplan and Norton (1992, 1996) is a performance measurement system which has been very popular in the literature as well as in practice. According to the authors it has become a strategic management tool (Kaplan and Norton, 2001a,b).
One of the components of a BSC is the strategy map, which is a representation of the causal relationships between strategic objectives of the organization. According to Kaplan and Norton (2004) a strategy map is a representation of the strategy of the firm.
In their review, Gomes et al. (2004), Neely (2005) and Nudurupati et al. (2011) emphasize the importance of the BSC in the literature on performance measurement systems and they also point out that it has been very popular among practitioners.
The main contribution of the BSC is the use of four perspectives to define strategic objectives and performance measures: Financial, Internal Processes, Clients and Growth and Learning, which are aligned to the mission and strategy of the organization.
A strategy map is an important element of a BSC (Kaplan and Norton, 1996, 2004). Authors such as Littler et al. (2000) and Quezada et al. (2009) have focused on the identification of the performance indicators (KPIs), but the literature on the identification of the relationships is rather limited as described below. In fact, an analysis of the authors of this paper has concluded that the journal papers and books by Kaplan and Norton do not address the issue. This is the motivation of the work presented in this paper.
Figure 1 illustrates an example of a strategy map. The nodes represent the strategic objectives and the directed arcs represent the cause-effect relationships between strategic objectives. An arc between a strategic objective A and a strategic objective B means that if the objective A is achieved then objective B may also be achieved. However, Nørreklit (2000) argues that Kaplan and Norton (1996) are not clear in the meaning of the concept of “causal relationship”. She states that more than causal relationships, what the BSC describes are logical relationships. Nørreklit (2003) also expresses that some cause-and-effect relationship presented in a BSC may be not true. In the same direction, Bessire and Baker (2005) state that the relationships of...