Brazilian Hospital Employee Perceptions of the BSC

ABSTRACT This article discusses the relevance of the use of balanced scorecards (BSCs) in two Brazilian hospitals. The academic criticisms of BSCs were aggregated into 23 topics and presented to a sample of employees from two hospitals, one public and one private. This led to three sets of results: (1) according to respondents, the BSC is applicable to hospitals; (2) employee perception of the BSC's impact on the operations of these hospitals was generally positive and the BSC has allowed them to fix typical management issues, contributing to greater employee participation in strategic management; (3) several BSC criticisms were not rejected while two were accepted: the difficulty of establishing goals and the persistence of traditional budgetary processes. Thus, contrary to part of the technical literature, the BSC was found to be a robust tool because it was considered useful, despite its imperfections.