Performance Measurements in a Chinese Labor Union

Sammanfattning: Performance measurement system, especially the Balanced Score Card (BSC) is gaining increasing popularity among various kinds of organizations, especially these years more and more non-profit organizations such as: schools, hospitals, labor unions, etc., are putting emphasis on the implementation of performance measure system to improve their practice. It was demonstrated that a great amount of actions that were made in non-profit organizations were improved after adopting multidimensional BSC. There have been a number of conducted researches and published theoretical developments that are related to performance measurements in non-profit organizations. However there are not many researchers that have been interested in the use of performance measurement such as BSC for labor unions. The distinctiveness of the labor unions is, unlike other non-profit organizations, due to their special positions between workers and owners of companies. Employees are one of the most important stakeholders groups for a company, especially for the manufacturing companies, while their performances are directly related to the company’s performance. According to the agent/principal theory there are goal conflicts between employees and employers, so the labor union is of high importance as its role is to protect labors’ benefits, negotiate with investors for wages and compensations, improve working environment, working rules, etc. It makes a great contribution to keep a ‘balance’ between employee and employer, which will benefit both sides if it is structured in a proper way. Therefore, the performance of the labor union is of high importance for the employees’ benefits and the company’s performance. The performance measurements that labor union conduct are not only influential to their own strategies and behaviors but also it will affect both the employees’ and the company’s benefit. Although many researches have been conducted on performance measurement system and BSC in non-profit organizations, few studies have touched the topic of performance measurement systems within labor unions. Our thesis indicate a case study of a Chinese local labor union and with expectations to find out what kind of performance measurements they have chosen, if these measurements can be related to any theories or models like BSC, why they have chosen these, and how these measurements are implemented in the organization. We also intend to find if the selected labor union establishes links between its strategic goals and its use of performance measurements. The reason we base our case study on the Chinese local labor union is that the Swedish labor union system is relatively well known, and most of the information is available for secondary resources. We find it interesting that the Chinese labor unions have not been mentioned much in literatures or other resources. Another interesting reflection is that the systems of the Chinese labor union differentiate from its counterpart in Sweden. We hope our study of performance measurements in Chinese labor union could be able to provide other perspectives in future researches. In order to analyze and provide a deeper understanding of the case, despite the Chinese case, we will present a general description of the organizational system of the Swedish labor union, and formulate a comparison of these two systems. Besides, we will explain the labor union’s position in the organizational system, so the complete understanding of the Chinese labor union will be achieved. The research question for our thesis is focused on the use of performance measurements in the Chinese case of the labor union, and discussing the connections between the union’s tasks, objectives and adopted measurements. We will also analyze the factors that influence the use of performance measurements. The purpose of our thesis is to explore and analyze the performance measurements adopted in a selected labor union in China. Through the genera