Temporal aspects of trade-offs in organisational performance: an illustration from post-disaster debris removal

Trade-offs - between risk and reward, efficiency and effectiveness - are endemic to an organisation's evolution and success. Until recently, however, organisational performance studies have suffered from a lack of detailed, longitudinal data, and therefore of methods that could exploit these data. While many organisations now deploy instrumentation to collect data on operations, those data are seldom directly suited to researchers' aims and are therefore characterised as 'secondary'. This paper addresses this two-fold gap by casting secondary data within a theoretically grounded measurement framework and employing an innovative approach - based on data envelopment analysis - to assessing the additional value provided by the data's temporal aspects. The domain of application, post-disaster debris removal, is time-constrained, potentially expensive, and crucial to post-disaster recovery. The results of this study strongly suggest the relevance of temporal aspects of the data to modelling of performance trade-offs, but also the need for further development of novel methodological approaches to examining performance trade-offs. [Received: 24 November 2020; Accepted: 7 August 2022]