A field experiment on the effects of benchmarking and goal setting on company sales performance
在一家电气产品分销公司进行实地实验，比较内部标杆管理、小赢目标设定和大爆炸目标设定三种策略对销售业绩提升的效果，发现标杆管理能有效改善绩效。
The effectiveness of internal benchmarking and goal-setting is examined in a field experiment carried out in an electrical products distribution company. The experiment involves a pre-post experimental design in which 138 branches of the company are assigned randomly to one of four conditions: (a) benchmarking; (b) "small-wins " goal-setting; (c) "big-bang " goal-setting; and (d) control group. The dependent vari-able is percentage increase in sales performance over a four month period. The findings point to the effectiveness of benchmarking for achieving improved performance and suggest that comparison against partners and knowledge about "best practice " contributes, together with goal-setting and goal-evaluation, to the efficacy of benchmarking. This paper eports on a unique field experiment in an organisational setting in which three strategies for creating improvement in company performance were compared. The three strategies are internal benchmarking, and two forms of goal-setting labelled, with some licence, "big bang " and "small wins " goal-setting. The main interest is in the benchmarking strategy, because it is a new, much publicised and widely used, but largely untested technique. We include the two goal-setting interventions in the study as a reference point for evaluating the efficacy of the benchmarking strategy. Benchmarking is a management technique for improving the operations of a department or organisation (Leibfried & McNair, 1992). When a company benchmarks, it rates itself against others with better business practices in order to identify factors that will enable it to perform as well as, or better than, competitors. Benchmarking is a systematic, ontinuous process, because what constitutes "best practice " continually changes. Watson's (1992) guidebook for