Measuring organizational performance in the absence of objective measures: The case of the privately‐held firm and conglomerate business unit

Abstract Strategic management researchers often encounter problems obtaining objective measures of selected aspects of organizational performance that are reliable and valid. With privately‐held firms, such data are frequently unavailable. With conglomerate business units, all or parts of such data are inextricably interwoven with corporate‐wide data. This paper examines the usefulness of subjective performance measures, obtained from top management teams, when problems are encountered in obtaining accurate performance data.