1. Introduction

In today's information age, companies face high competition and pressure while trying to perform successfully in the long term. To meet the dynamic competitive environment and the globalisation of markets accessible, companies are forced to hunt for competitiveness resulting

© 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

from the efficient use of general and specific knowledge. Accordingly, knowledge is becoming a competitive factor and provides an essential cause for company success. Therefore, it is important not only to consider obviously accessible knowledge but also to directly accomplish a performance-related use of the specific, implicit knowledge of a company. These individual experiences and knowledge such as fundamental components of human capital inhere a huge chance to improve the steering and control processes of performance generation and hence to master competition successfully. In the context of such a performance management (PM), expert knowledge is indispensably focused on relations between causes and effects to generate financial performance. By considering cause-and-effect relationships underlying the financial performance generation process the traditional perspective of measuring value realisation is extended to causally ambitioned value generation management. As a consequence, such a causal knowledge reveals options for actions influencing the financially as well as nonfinancially dimensioned causes, which are linked to future financial performance. Thus, PM provides relevant starting points to control the financial performance generation process.

In reality, companies comprise many departments with multiple environmental factors and, as a consequence, there exist many latent or manifest interdependently structured characteristics relevant for performance generation. Without knowledge of such relations, the management cannot efficiently control desirable effects by their causes. A map of causal relationships could care for more transparency in this respect. However, expert knowledge on success factors (SFs) and their causal relations is usually not available in the explicit form of a graphical representation. Instead, subjectively based knowledge, stemming from individuals´ observations and experiences, which are called implicit or tacit knowledge, might be identifiable and pending to be elicited.

Knowledge management (KM) recognised as a subdiscipline of PM can be applied to convert this implicit knowledge into explicit subjective knowledge on causal relationships, which can be identified and depicted by construction of a tailor-made causal map. Through the construction of the causal linkages during the mapping process, a subjective judgment bias can arise. With regard to this problem of subjectivity, specific methods of the multi-criteria research field, in particular the decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), can be used in the mapping context. DEMATEL provides a reduction of a potential personal bias when applying one of the common mapping methods. For this, a fictional case study will be presented adopting the target of achieving intersubjectivity.
