A institucionalização do Balanced Scorecard pelas organizações : o caso SABESP

Abstract

Sabesp is the largest Brazilian basic sanitation company and one of the largest in the world, serving 26.7 million people in São Paulo. As a mixed capital company, it manages the dualism that exists between a business vision and another vision that is essential to public service. This complex situation has made Sabesp strive to find management mechanisms that would enable it to reconcile its strategic guidelines with its operational actions, and so, since 2004 it has been developing a Strategic Planning and Management Support Mechanism project of which Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a part. It is known that despite the broad dissemination of BSC, its use remains controversial. The general objective of this research is to propose an evaluation model of the institutionalization of Balanced Scorecard by organizations. The research was conducted using the single case study methodology. Starting with New Institutional Sociology - NIS and from the concepts of institutionalization stages and comparative dimensions developed by Tolbert and Zucker, a model was proposed to evaluate the institutionalization of BSC in a given organization. The model not only places BSC in stages (pre-institutional, semi-institutional and total institutionalization), but also makes it possible to know each of the characteristics of BSC that associate it with this stage, as well as revealing the consequences that the stage has on BSC itself. Based on this, a methodology was structured by means of a research tool for an empirical study that enabled knowing the factors responsible for the institutionalization stage of BSC, and which was applied in the development of a study in the case of Sabesp. It can be concluded that BSC at Sabesp is part of a set of tools for managing the strategy that has not been limited to the model proposed by Kaplan and Norton and that at Sabesp the managers have a low level of agreement with the practices adopted in the organization compared to those proposed by their creators, especially those related to the third, fourth and fifth principles of BSC, so that an organization can be oriented for the strategy. The results show that the Sabesp BSC is at the semi-institutionalization stage in a process of deinstitutionalization, which could cause its discontinuation and loss of the benefits generated by it.