This article presents a summary of the most relevant findings of a research on the state of the art of organizational performance measurement systems in Brazil, carried out by the authors in 1997. The main concern of this research was to investigate in greater depth one of the conclusions of a previous study: a major barrier to the successful implementation of customer-oriented quality improvement strategies in companies in Brazil is the lack of adequate organizational performance measurement systems. The research confirmed that the cultural difficulty to change current measurement practices, so that they include qualitative measurement dimensions, constitutes one of the main causes for not adopting new, more adequate, measurement systems. At the same time, it revealed that the lack of adequate methodologies for measuring qualitative dimensions is perceived to be as significant a problem as the cultural difficulty. This last finding constituted the starting point for further investigations into the methodologies used by the firms selected for the research. It became thus evident that what is urgently needed are new or adapted organizational performance measurement methodologies that take into account Brazil's specific sociocultural contingencies.
Organizational performance measurement; balanced measurement systems; customer-oriented strategies; performance indicators