Strategic performance management systems in Italian banks : a research note

Over the last decades strategic performance management systems (SPMSs) have attracted a considerable interest, however, despite their great popularity and use only a few investigations describe their uses in Italian banks. The aim of this paper is to provide a picture about the practices and contents of SPMSs showing their features and serving as a reference for academics and practitioners. This paper highlights the extent to which SPMSs are quite common in banks and their features resemble to the traditional model developed by Kaplan and Norton for the traditional balanced scorecard (BSC). Italian banks prefer using SPMSs characterized by multi-dimensional perspectives containing both financial and non-financial measures and link incentive systems to targets paying, in same case, attention to strategic relations. Besides, several banks introduce a further perspective devotes to measure exclusively the global risk level of the bank. [Publishers' text].