Managers often get trapped in no-win trade-offs to achieve targets: Preventing order backlogs can result in spiralling overtime costs; tightening overhead spend can result in delays filling orders; prioritising speed to meet delivery dates can drive defect rates up; aggressive quality targets can reduce production throughput and increase costs. Under this kind of pressure, do managers chase the most visible or easily measured targets, even when those are not the ones that matter most?
Performance measurement has long been rooted in numbers — cost targets, efficiency, defect rates, and service disruptions. But numbers rarely speak for themselves. In fact, the framing of performance metrics, through the company values, rituals, cues, and narratives that surround those metrics, can strongly influence the choices managers make (see the sidebar, “Managers’ Role in Interpreting Targets”).
Our recent study published with Anne Lillis, Professor Emerita at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in Management Accounting Research offers new insights into the complexity of managing multiple and frequently competing performance metrics. The research, which won the CIMA-sponsored 2025 David Solomons Prize, draws on two case studies in the medical devices industry and shows how managers grapple to interpret and reconcile simultaneous demands around cost, quality, and service, while keeping sight of the higher-level goals those measures are meant to represent.
Company values as anchors in a sea of metrics
Our study highlights the tensions managers face when juggling multiple performance targets. Results-focused performance measurement systems can unintentionally encourage behaviours such as building slack, negotiating easier targets, gaming the numbers, and prioritising short-term wins.
These dysfunctional effects can escalate over time, contributing to serious consequences both within and beyond the organisation, and they tend to be amplified when managers face multiple, competing targets. For example, offering customised services can boost customer satisfaction, but it also complicates processes, creates bottlenecks, and increases costs. When these tensions are not actively managed, managers often gravitate towards what is easiest to measure or simplest to defend — typically efficiency-led, numeric indicators. As a result, harder-to-measure outcomes such as customer experience may receive less attention, even though they may be equally, if not more, important to long-term success.
In our research, we draw on the idea of framing to bring otherwise abstract company values to life, something that managers can actually apply when interpreting performance targets.
Introducing emphasis frames
Frames are used to focus attention on particular information, creating a lens for making sense of complexity. They do this by isolating certain features of a situation so they stand out more clearly. This might involve specific words, images, or styles of presentation. Frames shape what people notice, how they understand an issue, and what they prioritise in decision-making. We call these “emphasis frames”, and they highlight practical reference points.
Our findings point to three core elements in how emphasis frames operate in practice:
- Cues: Signals that bring a particular way of thinking to the forefront.
- Rituals: Repeated behaviours or routines that reinforce a frame within the organisation.
- Resonance: The degree to which a frame connects with people, making it more likely to endure.
Together, these elements are the basis of effective emphasis framing and help explain how key messages gain traction within organisations. Applying this to performance targets, identical sets of metrics can lead to very different decisions depending on the values or cues that frame the interpretation. By articulating a higher-level reference point that transcends the demands of individual metrics, organisational values can become a practical guide for action.
Emphasis framing using company values
Across our two cases, we found managers actively using values as emphasis frames that shape how they interpret and balance multiple performance targets in day-to-day decisions.
Patient care frame
In one company, the mission was centred around enhancing patients’ lives, and it was reinforced so consistently that it functioned as a genuine driver of action rather than a slogan. The mission was a standing opening agenda item at all formal events such as town hall meetings and project reviews, reflecting a ritualised, “mission-first” practice.
Advancing the mission meant prioritising patient care. That commitment was brought to life through patient and physician videos shown at each town hall, illustrating the real-world impact of products and creating an emotional connection that helped the mission resonate. One research interviewee described this as “actual examples of the mission, videos of people that have received our products, and how they value the change that it has made to their life”.
Delivering on the mission to enhance patient care means delivering on demanding performance targets in the areas of quality, service, and cost, but these were interpreted through the mission lens of patient care.
At an operational level, this created a strong sense of conscientiousness around quality. Failures were framed not as defects on a chart but as risks to vulnerable patients.
One manager made this highly relatable: “It could be your mother, it could be your father, it could be your brother. These are people who are already sick. We don’t want anything from our product to compromise them in any shape or form.”
Cost targets were framed in terms of access. High costs could limit efforts to expand access to life-saving products in low-income regions. That context gave efficiency efforts a more meaningful impetus than euros saved — “We’re trying to be more efficient so we can get [products] to people who can’t afford them today,” one research interviewee said.
Service shortcomings, meanwhile, were discussed using narratives that illustrated the consequences arising from the unavailability of a required product for a vulnerable patient in a hospital: “[The patient] could die because they [the hospital staff treating the patient] don’t have the product on the shelf,” one interviewee said.
Together, these practices anchor day-to-day performance debates in something bigger than short-term numbers and make the connection between values and everyday work tangible.
For managers, the lesson is clear: Performance targets gain meaning when they are interpreted through the lens of organisational values. So, a cost-saving initiative that might compromise on quality, for example, is judged differently when the mission explicitly prioritises patient care.
Absence of framing around corporate values
Our second case study showed a different approach to the framing of performance metrics. Here, the managers we interviewed showed little connection to the corporate mission and values, which were described as generic, frequently changing, and largely disconnected from day-to-day behaviours.
This lack of resonance created a vacuum that local leadership filled with a different emphasis frame focused on site competitiveness and reputation. Cues around uncertainty about future product allocations, regulatory scrutiny, and the realities of operating in a high-cost environment consistently reinforced the need to excel in quality, service, and cost efficiency to secure future work and protect local jobs. As one interviewee described: “Our value proposition is jobs for our kids and our kids’ kids here. We should have a 50-year plan. The threat of products being moved to lower-cost regions for manufacturing purposes are big, big threats. Losing jobs and the impact on the livelihood of everybody here and in the hinterland.”
This focus was reinforced in regular cost benchmarking that made labour cost gaps with sister sites highly visible, intensifying attention on efficiency for winning future work.
The potential impact of job losses on the local economy also resonated strongly, linking daily performance to community wellbeing and long-term site viability.
One manager described how he emphasised these concerns at staff meetings: “The responsibility we have to keep jobs going because the employees here are eating in restaurants, drinking at bars, going to sports events, etc, there’s a massive spinoff from here.”
While this emphasis frame was clearly influential, it was less embedded in formal routines than in the first case, reflecting an earlier-stage, site-specific values initiative. Nonetheless, the shared reference point of site competitiveness was beginning to guide managers’ interpretation of trade-offs to build more cross-functional awareness and to support the development of capabilities needed to differentiate the site through complex, high-value work.
Taken together, our cases show two distinct but effective pathways to framing performance targets. In the first, a strong, top-down mission narrative consistently anchored performance goals in patient welfare. In the second case, an emerging bottom-up narrative focused on protecting the site’s competitiveness provided a credible reference point in the absence of resonant corporate values. In both settings, managers relied on these frames to make sense of performance targets, navigate trade-offs, and decide what really matters.
Practical takeaways for managers
The findings are relevant for managers who design, implement, or use performance measurement systems. The study suggests several practical actions managers can take to enhance their performance measurement systems by linking performance metrics clearly to the organisation’s purpose:
- Articulate a clear big-picture anchor. An overarching point of reference makes it easier to interpret metrics and navigate trade-offs when objectives collide.
- Embed company values into everyday performance conversations. Don’t let values remain a plaque on the wall. Commence meetings (project performance review, etc) with cues that explicitly connect targets to the organisation’s higher mission.
- Understand your targets and how to manage multiple objectives. Recognise that financial, service, and quality targets often pull managers in different directions. Develop simple prioritisation “credos” (eg, quality first, then service, then cost) to guide decisions when tensions arise.
- Use your rituals and cues strategically to reinforce the right priorities. Awards, recognition programmes, and even visual reminders (awards, quality statements, mission statements, and impact videos) can reinforce the use of values as an overarching frame for interpreting performance targets.
- Identify gaps in how company values permeate throughout the organisation. When formal organisational values fail to resonate, local managers may construct their own frames (eg, around local competitiveness). While this can build shared purpose, it also needs careful alignment with the corporate mission.
The bigger picture
For managers, the study is a reminder that management control is as much about behaviour and culture as it is about numbers. Values and frames are not soft add-ons; they are central mechanisms that can prevent performance measurement systems from becoming box-ticking exercises or, worse, drivers of unethical shortcuts.
As accounting professionals increasingly take on strategic and advisory roles, understanding how values and frames influence decision-making is essential. In the end, it is not just about getting the numbers right, but about making sure those numbers correspond to the right decisions and result in sustainable performance.
Managers’ role in interpreting targets
Performance measurement is not just about meeting the target but about shaping how the targets are interpreted. Managers can play a critical role in embedding the right emphasis frames through the design and presentations of performance reports and dashboards, discussion of trade-offs, and the rituals that surround performance review meetings.
- Cost over service? Managers in the study faced overtime decisions on whether to incur extra costs or let product delivery slip. The mission frame (“How would this align with our mission?”) tipped the balance towards service.
- Compliance versus competitiveness? In another case, local managers used reputational frames (“Our site must remain competitive”) to prioritise regulatory compliance and reputation–building, even at higher short–term cost.
- Quality over cost? Managers in the study faced decisions on whether to increase sterilisation runs to improve quality, which would lead to further cost. The credo of “quality first” was used to prioritise the additional sterilisation runs.
- Function versus overall business? Managers we interviewed were tempted to make decisions that benefited their own function. But a values framing helped them pull back and consider if this might be at the expense of the wider organisation.
Breda Sweeney, Ph.D., is a professor, and Patricia Martyn, Ph.D., is a lecturer — both at the J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics, University of Galway, Ireland. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Oliver Rowe at Oliver.Rowe@aicpa-cima.com.
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