Measuring the Quality of Workplace Relations and Organizational Performance with Alternative Balanced Scorecards from Strategic HRM and Employment-Industrial Relations

Abstract

This paper uses the popular balanced scorecard from strategic management, and a new survey data set, to empirically measure and evaluate the state of workplace employment capabilities, relations, practices, and performance for shareholders and stakeholders. An innovative feature is that two alternative scorecards are constructed based, respectively, on the high-performance work system (HPWS) model and model of an employment relations system (ERS). The two models are depicted and compared in diagrams, used as theoretical frameworks to build alternative scorecards, and filled in with nationally-representative data on more than fifty workplace attributes provided by separate panels of managers and employees from over 2,000 U.S. workplaces. The workplace performance scores are transformed into frequency distributions showing, first, the mean and dispersion of U.S. workplaces as ordered from lowest to highest performance and, second, evidence that the HPWS and ERS models yield different evaluation assessments – indicating "models matter" for scorecard analysis.