An exploration of inclusion of spirituality into the balanced scorecard (BSC) to support financial performance: A review

Abstract

The BSC has been well accepted as a suitable tool for assessing and monitoring financial performance of organisations. Subsequently it has been embraced by organisations as financial and nonfinancial performance indicators that help organizations align their initiatives with the organization's strategy. However, the question of how the BSC can be enhanced to incorporate non-financial performance is still being raised. One of the important non-financial prospectives is the Spirituality. The goal of this paper is to review the recent research on Spirituality as nonfinancial performance indicator for the BSC. In this paper an overview of the BSC and its perspectives is given, providing a justification for the importance of non financial performance measures to overall organizational performance. The novelty of this paper is that through an elaborate discussion, Spirituality is proposed as a potential additional dimension that can enhance the BSC. Subsequently, the enhanced BSC would incorporate spirituality as an important dimension that affects employees as well employers, who are the key drivers of financial performance. Overall, the proposed dimension would strengthens the tool’s efficiency and effectiveness.