The new manufacturing environment, global competition and information technology represent issues often used to justify the need for organizations to change how they assess their overall performance. Behavioral accounting research provides insights on relationships between the level of reliance on accounting information for performance evaluation and individual behavior. From another perspective, agency studies investigate how organization's ability to function successfully is determined by the availability of performance information upon which managers can act. In an attempt to better understand how and why these theories may shed new lights on the evaluation of organizational overall performance, this paper discusses three related issues being: What are the main dimensions of organizational performance? How and to which extent is reward system related to performance evaluation? Why is performance criteria definition a difficult task?
behavioral accounting; performance evaluation; reward; performance criteria
