Defining and measuring organizational success: toward a dynamic, multi-dimensional model

Summary form only given. While the study of organizational performance has been at the core of management research for many years, real issues still exist in the definition and measurement of organization performance. In this paper, dedicated to commercial for-profit organizations, we attempt to organize and integrate the empirical literature on performance measures as seen through five research streams and suggest a new framework for further investigation. These streams are: corporate entrepreneurship, strategy, process and product development, marketing, and economics/finance, and each would look at success measures from a different angle and knowledge base and hopefully offer critical clues toward a more fully developed performance model in the future. Specifically, our suggested model will synthesize the previous empirical research for the five literature streams into five distinct success dimensions (Financial, Customer/Market, Process, People Development, Future) and create a framework that when fully developed will be multidimensional in nature, see success as a dynamic, on-going concept, that is being assessed on various timeframes-from the very short, to the very long term, and represent multiple stakeholders.