The Socio-technical Balanced Scorecard: A Framework for Assessing a Public University

The socio-technical theory is concerned with human well-being; it is democratic, humanistic and provides both freedom and knowledge to those who are part of it. Balanced scorecard is an approach that assesses whether the organization is meeting its objectives in terms of vision and strategy. It measures four perspectives: financial, customer, internal business processes and innovation & learning. Although the balanced scorecard has proven to be fruitful in the for-profit organizations of the past, most non-profit organizations had difficulty applying the balanced scorecard. The original configuration of balanced scorecard placed financial goals on the top of the hierarchy and since maximizing shareholder wealth is not the main objective for most non-profit organizations, it was not widely applied by these organizations. As non-profit organizations commonly operate on humanistic welfare paradigm and well-being of the society, the ideas of socio-technical work design may receive a greater acceptance in these organizations than in for-profit organizations. Hence, a socio-technical balanced scorecard for the non-profit organizations will be developed with an emphasis on employee perspective. More specifically, a public university wide assessment will be proposed in this paper.