Research Interest

Topics

Biography

Françoise Giraud is an associate professor at ESCP Europe.  She has been teaching and co-ordinating programmes for both students and professionals since 1991. After her early professional experience in auditing, her interest in pedagogy and more qualitative aspects of management lead her to towards a post of teacher/researcher at  ESCP Europe.  Her PhD thesis tackled the issue of managerial accountability in a complex environment (University of Paris-Dauphine, 2000). In the Management Control Department, her particular interests are the role of performance measurement systems in motivating and assessing managers. She is the author of several articles and contributions to books on the subject, and has co-ordinated and co-written collective works on performance management.

She is also a qualified coach who helps professionals and individuals facing transitions or wishing to enhance their personal and professional projects.

Current research

Different performance measurement systems, principles and debates.Performance measurement is a topical question debated both in companies and the academic world. The role of measurement, its virtues, limits and pitfalls and the methods and tools for setting up systems of financial and non-financial indicators, raise many questions. The debate is often clouded by over-simplification and confusions between different functions of measurement systems: strategic planning of organisations, performance evaluation of their different  activity segments, accountability of managers in charge of operational and functional entities in a context of management by objectives, indicators for decentralised piloting, external reporting, etc.  These different roles are governed by specific orientations and principles which are useful to clarify in order to guide the operational construction of measurement systems, and also to understand their pertinence and limits. Furthermore, the overlapping of these systems and how to combine them, poses a particular difficulty.The controllability principle in managerial performance measurement systems.The controllability principle stipulates that managers in charge of units within companies should be evaluated based only on the performance items they can control.  This principle, which aims at protecting managerial motivation based on organizational justice arguments, is much debated and appears to be heterogeneously applied in companies. A deeper understanding of managerial expectations and a finer analysis according to the type of uncontrollable factors (external factors, internal decisions made by other managers, hierarchical decisions) have led to several communications at research conferences and publication in an academic journal.

Publications