Assessing empirical research on value-based management: Guidelines for improved hypothesis testing

The claims that value-based management (VBM) increases corporate performance have attracted considerable interest among researchers and organizations over the last three decades. Even though many studies have been conducted, the evidence on whether users outperform non-users is inconsistent. This paper attempts to place these diverse findings into perspective, and provide venues for future research. For that purpose, we drafted a framework to analyze 120 empirical studies on VBM. We concluded that meaningful hypothesis tests have been impaired by the narrow scope of data sets as well as methodological misspecifications. Based on this analysis, we categorized studies into four streams of research, employing factor analysis and cluster analysis. We then suggested that the most sophisticated studies identified positive performance effects of VBM. Lastly, we derived guidelines to improve the hypothesis testing of future studies on VBM.