PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT PROCESS IN ORGANIZATIONS AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Continuous performance is the objective of any organization because only through performance, organizations are able to grow and progress. The first necessary condition to improve and achieve business excellence is to develop and implement a performance measurement system. Performance measurement has become a topic of growing interest among theoreticians and practitioners especially since the late 1980s. So far, there were numerous studies that had as an objective conducting a diagnosis of the performance measurement process in organizations. This paper has two objectives: first of all we were interested in conducting an analysis of the performance measurement process in Romanian manufacturing companies and second of all we tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between the performance measurement process and a number of variables such as: the size of the organization, the degree of IT use and the uncertainty of the business environment. The organization selected for this study have been chosen on the basis that they were manufacturing oriented. To gather data necessary for conducting our empirical study we used a questionnaire that was send to all manufacturing companies registered in the database "Pro Business Romania 2010" from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In order to test our hypotheses we conducted a factorial analysis to identify the main components of the variables used in our study: performance measurement and the uncertainty of the business environment. The results of our study show a partial validation of the first hypothesis regarding the relationship between the size of the organization and the performance measurement process,: the second one regarding the degree of IT use and the performance measurement process is fully validated and the last one regarding the relationship between the uncertainty of the business environment and the performance measurement process is again partially validated.