The Balanced Scorecard and Environmental Management: A Study in the Public and Private Portuguese Sector

Abstract

The social and environmental aspects are increasingly recognized as strategic in the organization, as they provide new opportunities for value creation through the development of competitive advantages that can differentiate companies from their current and potential competitors. The adoption and development of new technologies, strategies and tools for managing social and environmental issues is, nowadays, a matter beyond dispute. However, there are several difficulties in quantifying economically and financially the policies for sustainable development, leading to the development or adaptation of management tools, such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). Thus, in order to find out if the Portuguese public and private organizations include social and environmental indicators in their scorecards, and whether there is a relationship between the use of the BSC and environmental certification systems, we sent a questionnaire to 591 public and 549 private organizations in Portugal, with a response rate of 31.3%. The findings suggest that most of the respondents include social and environmental indicators in their scorecards and that environmentally certified companies use BSC more than non-certified.