Evolution of Performance Measurement Research: An Update on Research Development from 2005 to 2020 and Future Outlook for the Field

Abstract

Research in performance measurement has been growing rapidly over the past seven decades, and it has explored a wide spectrum of issues in multiple industries and sectors, from assessing airports’ efficiency to proposing frameworks to improve supply chain management. The field has also attracted the attention of scholars to conduct several literature reviews to understand the evolution of the research in the field, given its multidisciplinary nature. Given the sustained academic interest in this field and lack of consensus on its maturity, this paper uses co-occurrence, citation, and co-citation analyses to examine the field's research development and academic maturity. Findings from this study inform the performance measurement literature in three ways; by highlighting the absence of adequate examination of effectiveness, an essential complement to the extensively studied efficiency in the current literature; by indicating ‘practical implementation’ as the current stage of research evolution of the field; and by emphasizing the need to adopt novel theoretical perspectives. It also extends the literature review previously conducted by other scholars (from 1950 to 2005) to update the research community on developments in the field from 2005 to 2020. This paper argues that while this research area has shown signs of academic maturity and professionalism, there seems to be continued reliance on a limited number of works despite the field entering a practical implementation phase. Finally, this study proposes a path for empirical verification for some of the key theoretical foundations found in the literature.