Options of the Sustainability Aspects Implementation into the Balanced Scorecard Concept.

Neither in the academic sphere nor in professional practice there is a general agreement on the understanding and definition of the terms sustainable development and corporate social responsibility, despite the awareness of the wide range of socially responsible activities both at the microeconomic and macroeconomic level. The reason for this may lie in the fact that socially responsible activities are based on volunteerism. Research exploring the impact of socially responsible activities to the corporate financial performance has been published still more intensively. The ways, how to link up the corporate social responsibility concept effectively to the used performance methods in enterprise practice, are researched as well. The results of the realized quantitative research show that the Balanced Scorecard concept (or similarly the Excellence Model) is so robust that its use in the Czech enterprise practice is not so common. In a similar way the long-term integration of sustainability aspects into the approaches to the enterprise performance management is not so common. How the data received from the research sample show, Czech manufacturing companies rarely implement the whole complex approach. They often implement only the main ideas of the concepts (Excellence Model, Balanced Scorecard, Total Quality Management, etc) along with a few metrics (key performance indicators, so called KPIs) - to include social and environmental aspects within responsible behaviour (sustainability entrepreneurship). Therefore there are analyzed and evaluated the options how to implement sustainability aspects into the Balanced Scorecard concept. The Balanced Scorecard concept belongs to the most used performance management methods in the current practice of manufacturing companies in the Czech Republic. This paper is based on the desk research scientific method using secondary data in the field of corporate social responsibility and corporate sustainable performance. Empirical research in this paper is conducted in the form of a questionnaire survey. It maps the use of the Balanced Scorecard concept and other concepts for the performance management of medium-sized manufacturing companies with the place of business in two regions of the Czech Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]