Abstract
Organisations, regardless of their ownership orientation, need to develop measures or indicators to assess their performance. These measures, within a performance measurement system (PMS), are also expected to guide business managers’ decisions, including employee incentive or reward schemes. Through the PMS, the organisation communicates how it wishes its employees to behave and how this behaviour will be judged and evaluated. Recently, government organisations have also opted for a private-sector style PMS where emphasis has been placed on indicators or measures oriented towards financial as well as non-financial aspects of government activities. Such an orientation has been triggered by governments’ recent reform programmes for the public sector. This chapter reports on how government departments and non-profit organisations will benefit from implementing a private-sector style PMS such as the Balanced Scorecard for improving organisational effectiveness. In so doing, the chapter uses some empirical evidence from Australia as examples.