Goal ambiguity and performance information use

Organizational goal ambiguity refers to “the extent to which an organizational goal or set of goals allows leeway for interpretation when the organizational goal represents the desired future state of the organization” (Chun, Y.H. and Rainey, H.G. 2005 a, 2). Instead, Moynihan, D. P. (2008, 5) defines performance management as a “system that generates performance information through strategic planning and performance measurement routines and that connects this information to decision venues, where, ideally, the information influences a range of possible decisions”. In this chapter, we illustrate how the systematic review was separately conducted for goal ambiguity and performance information use topics concerning previous studies in management. The systematic literature review was guided by the assumption that a relationship exists between goal ambiguity and performance information use and influences the organization’s performance. Specifically, the objectives of the review are: - To review separately the literature on the performance information use and goal ambiguity topic and identify the paper that studies both topics. - Establish the nature of the relationship between goal ambiguity and performance information use. According to the previous systematic literature review in management, we developed: a) quantitative data analysis for the distribution of the articles published per year and geographic localization, number of publications per journal, the affiliation of authors, number of articles published per author, origin of the sample, sample size, study approach, statistical techniques, type of data, study design, research methodology; b) qualitative analysis is based on the summary of articles according to the variables approach of study. The results of the systematic review analysis were limited to 68 studies on performance information use and 48 studies on goal ambiguity issues. From the selected papers the results clearly show that only 12 articles study both topics and establish a relationship between goal ambiguity and performance information use.