Mission and Revenue: Measuring Performance in a Hybrid

Organization

The goal of the paper is to measure the firm social and financial performances in a hybrid organization.
The SBSC (Hansen and Schaltegger, 2014) was judged as an ideal tool to deal with the informative needs
expressed by the stakeholders who were looking for a new management approach for evaluating
organizational performances.

From a managerial point of view, the concept of in-house providing refers to conducting activities,
delivering services or producing goods within an organization instead of relying on third parties by means
of outsourcing.

This paper describes the result of a collaborative project between the researchers and the management of
ICTCo aimed at creating a performance measurement tool to change the managerial system of
measurement by evaluating ICTCo performance in terms of strategic results and in particular by taking
into account the CSR goals achieved.

From the Customer Perspective, it is interesting to note how the penetration in the local market increased
over the period reaching almost 90% of the hypothetical market size.

The goal of this index is to show what share of a time and labour consuming activity as the software
development is externalized to other companies. Although not considered as a social responsibility index,
it makes it possible to track a mission drift.

The Social Responsibility model based on the Balanced Scorecard presented in this work was developed
to meet the needs of the firm and its shareholders.

This paper can contribute to providing the readers with a roadmap which could be used by other hybrid
organizations of the ITC sector seeking more holistic measurement tools aimed at including CSR in the
strategic vision of the firm.

The paper aims to contribute to the literature concerning performance measurement tools which allow a
balanced control of both social goals and financial performances in a hybrid organization.

The relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (hereafter CSR) and financial performance
is indeed a recurring topic in management.

The action research project presented in this work is ICTCo, a hybrid organization of Northern Italy.

The selected tool, namely the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (hereafter SBSC), helped the
organization evaluate whether CSR practices are consistent with the goals and values of companies in
the long run.

Unfreezing. In Lewin’s thought, behaviours are based on a quasi-stationary equilibrium supported by

complex forces. Before the old behaviour can be discarded (unlearnt) and the new behaviour
successfully adopted, the equilibrium needs to be destabilized (unfrozen).

Moving. The action research-based approach enables groups, individuals and organizations to move
to a more acceptable set of behaviours.
 Refreezing. This step aims at stabilizing the group at a new quasi-stationary equilibrium in order to
ensure that the new behaviours are relatively safe from regression. Within organizations, refreezing
requires changes to organizational policies and practices

The paper shows how a useful tool for measuring social and financial performances has to be driven
by the stakeholders’ needs and has to take into consideration the organizational mission.

The management wanted to develop a model to help controlling the firm’s performance, while giving
the right attention to many social responsibility values related to the organizational mission.