Measuring Stakeholders’ Influence on Business Performance: Case of Slovakia

Current socio-economic issues, such as ongoing ecological challenges, post-COVID-19 pandemic economic shock, potential future economic recession, the war in Ukraine and other threats, accumulated altogether in 2022. This work aims to emphasise the necessity to view and run a business under the stakeholder capitalism paradigm along with making a synthesis of empirical studies focusing on Balanced scorecard (BSC) application. We suggest that already existing tools of strategic management and business performance measurements such as BSC or similar would be very helpful instruments on the way to resilient and sustainable entrepreneurship in the observed future. Realising, identifying, and measuring stakeholders’ impact on a company’s performance appeared to be challenging for Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Slovak businesses. In our methodology, we used secondary data analysis and synthesis. A starting point was a before-pandemic snapshot of BSC usage worldwide, particularly in Slovak business. We attempted to find a correlation between BSC usage and GPD per capita. Then we overlapped results on the current SMEs situation with the Slovak Statistical office. The results showed us that there is no unequivocal dependency between BSC usage and GDP per capita, although the results are limited by a number of observations. Secondly, potentially more than 70% of the primary stakeholders such as employees and customers in the Slovak Republic have left without measuring their needs. The practical implications of this research could be useful for businesses to use stakeholder engagement technics, such as advanced business performance measures. The theoretical contribution of this paper help to further research on similar topics of stakeholder interaction and performance measurement.