Toward a dynamic balanced scorecard model for humanitarian relief organizations’ performance management

Purpose: In recent years, the balanced scorecard (BSC) has received considerable interest among practitioners for managing their organization’s performance. Unfortunately existing BSC frameworks, particularly for humanitarian supply chains, lack causal relationships among performance indicators, actions, and outcomes. They are not able to provide a dynamic perspective of the organization with factors that drive the organization’s behavior toward its mission. Lack of conceptual references seems to hinder the development of a performance measurement system toward this direction. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: The authors formulate the interdependencies among key performance indicators (KPIs) in terms of cause-and-effect relationships based on published case studies reported in international journals from 1996 to 2017. Findings: This paper aims to identify the conceptual interdependencies among KPIs and represent them in the form of a conceptual model. Research limitations/implications: The study was solely based on relevant existing literature. Therefore further practical research is needed to validate the interdependencies of performance indicators in the strategy map. Practical implications: The proposed conceptual model provides the structure of a dynamic balanced scorecard (DBSC) in the humanitarian supply chain and should serve as a starting reference for the development of a practical DBSC model. The conceptual framework proposed in this paper aims to facilitate further research in developing a DBSC for humanitarian organizations (HOs). Originality/value: Existing BSC frameworks do not provide a dynamic perspective of the organization. The proposed conceptual framework is a useful reference for further work in developing a DBSC for HOs.