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Surrogation

Surrogation is a cognitive bias observed in management and organizational settings, where individuals treat a performance measure as a direct substitute for the underlying strategic objective or construct it was designed to evaluate, often resulting in decisions that prioritize the metric over the actual goal.^[1] This phenomenon, also known as strategy surrogation, leads managers to lose sight of broader strategic intent, substituting quantifiable proxies for complex, abstract aims such as innovation or customer value.^[2] The concept of surrogation has been explored in management accounting research since at least the early 2010s, building on foundational ideas like Goodhart's law—which posits that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"—and Campbell's law, which highlights how social indicators can distort behaviors when incentivized.^[1] Early experimental studies demonstrated that surrogation occurs nonconsciously, even without explicit incentives, when managers evaluate strategies based on measures like financial returns or efficiency scores, leading to suboptimal choices in dynamic environments.^[2] For instance, a manager pursuing product innovation might favor projects with high short-term revenue projections over those fostering long-term creativity, as the metric overshadows the strategic construct.^[3] Research indicates that surrogation propensity can be mitigated through mechanisms such as involving managers in strategy selection, which enhances alignment with objectives, or incorporating flexibility into performance measurement systems, particularly in volatile settings where rigid metrics exacerbate the bias.^[1] These findings underscore surrogation's implications for organizational performance, emphasizing the need for balanced measurement systems that preserve focus on strategic constructs amid pressures from compensation ties or environmental dynamism.^[3]

Definition and Overview

Core Definition

Surrogation is a psychological phenomenon prevalent in business practices, wherein a performance measure designed as a proxy for a strategic construct gradually supplants that construct, leading managers and organizations to treat the measure itself as the primary objective. This substitution occurs when individuals, faced with complex strategic goals, nonconsciously prioritize quantifiable metrics over the nuanced realities they are intended to represent, often resulting in misaligned decisions and suboptimal outcomes.^[4] The core mechanism underlying surrogation is attribute substitution, a heuristic process identified in cognitive psychology, by which people replace demanding cognitive tasks—such as evaluating multifaceted strategic constructs—with simpler judgments based on readily available cues, such as performance metrics. In business contexts, this manifests nonconsciously as managers heuristically equate easier-to-assess proxies with harder-to-measure goals, bypassing deeper analysis of strategic intent. For example, scores from customer satisfaction surveys might evolve into surrogates for actual customer loyalty, where efforts focus on inflating survey responses rather than enhancing genuine experiences.^[4]^[5] Surrogation differs from broader forms of attribute substitution by its specific application to organizational settings, where metrics tied to incentives or performance systems replace strategic objectives, potentially distorting behavior in ways akin to Goodhart's Law, which observes that targeted measures lose reliability as proxies. This distinction underscores surrogation's focus on business metrics supplanting goals, rather than generic judgmental shortcuts in everyday cognition.^[4]

Key Characteristics

Surrogation is fundamentally a nonconscious cognitive process rooted in attribute substitution, a heuristic mechanism where individuals automatically replace a difficult target judgment—such as evaluating a complex strategic construct—with a simpler, more accessible proxy attribute, like a performance measure.^[6] This substitution occurs intuitively and without deliberate intent, as part of System 1 thinking that operates quickly and effortlessly, often bypassing reflective analysis.^[7] In the context of surrogation, decision-makers unconsciously treat the measure as equivalent to the underlying objective, leading to judgments that reflect the proxy rather than the true construct.^[8] The phenomenon arises under specific conditions that facilitate heuristic reliance, including high cognitive load where the target construct is relatively inaccessible or abstract, and the proxy measure is salient, easy to process, and prominently featured—such as in performance evaluation systems emphasizing single metrics.^[6] Alignment between incentives and the measure can further enable surrogation by drawing attention to the proxy, though this operates independently of deliberate goal-setting.^[9] These factors collectively lower the mental effort required for substitution, making the heuristic more likely when the measure appears as a straightforward stand-in for the more demanding evaluation.^[7] Behaviorally, surrogation results in goal displacement, where efforts to optimize the proxy inadvertently undermine the original strategic objective, as individuals prioritize measurable outcomes over holistic aims.^[6] For instance, focusing intensely on a single metric may yield short-term gains in that indicator but compromise broader performance constructs it was meant to represent.^[1] Unlike conscious biases such as intentional manipulation or gaming of metrics, surrogation represents an unwitting cognitive shortcut driven by intuitive heuristics, not purposeful distortion.^[6] This distinction underscores its automaticity, where the substitution occurs below awareness, contrasting with deliberate actions that require explicit recognition of the proxy's limitations.^[7]

Historical Development

Origins and First Usage

The term "surrogation" was coined in 2012 by researchers Jongwoon (Willie) Choi, Gary W. Hecht, and William B. Tayler in their seminal paper examining managerial decision-making in accounting contexts.^[6] In this work, published in The Accounting Review, the authors introduced surrogation to describe the phenomenon where individuals, particularly managers, treat proxy measures of strategic objectives as substitutes for the underlying strategies themselves, leading to distorted evaluations and decisions.^[6] The concept's roots trace to earlier discussions of surrogate measures in accounting, notably Yuji Ijiri's foundational explorations of how measurements serve as proxies for complex economic realities, such as valuation representing causal networks in financial reporting.^[10] Choi et al. built on this tradition by observing how performance-based incentive compensation exacerbates the substitution of easily quantifiable measures for broader strategic assessments, drawing from empirical observations in organizational settings where incentives prioritize measurable outcomes over holistic strategy.^[6] In its initial usage, the paper focused on experimental evidence demonstrating surrogation's occurrence in managerial contexts under incentive pay structures, where participants evaluated strategies using single or multiple performance measures and exhibited a tendency to conflate the proxies with the actual strategic constructs.^[6] This framing highlighted surrogation as a behavioral risk in incentive design, with roots in cognitive processes akin to attribute substitution, where heuristics replace effortful judgments.^[6]

Evolution in Academic Literature

Following the introduction of the surrogation concept in the seminal 2012 paper by Choi, Hecht, and Tayler, academic literature began to expand its scope beyond the initial focus on incentives in performance measurement systems. Post-2012 research broadened surrogation to encompass general measurement challenges in organizational contexts, where proxies for abstract constructs like strategy inadvertently displace the constructs themselves. This shift integrated insights from cognitive psychology, particularly attribute substitution heuristics, to explain how managers psychologically substitute measurable indicators for unobservable strategic goals.^[9] Similarly, dashboard design in management accounting was examined as a facilitator of surrogation, where streamlined, limited metrics in visual interfaces lead managers to treat indicators as proxies for broader performance objectives. The 2019 study by Bentley further advanced the field by showing how narrative reporting mitigates surrogation in dynamic environments, allowing managers to contextualize metrics and avoid over-reliance on quantifiable surrogates.^[11] Building on this, Black, Kirwan, Meservy, Tayler, and Williams in 2024 explored surrogation's persistence as an inherent cognitive bias in evaluation processes, independent of compensation structures.^[12] The concept's interdisciplinary growth incorporated surrogation into accounting, management, and psychology literatures. In accounting research, it parallels Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where shadows (metrics) are mistaken for reality (strategy), underscoring the risk of perceptual distortion in performance evaluation.^[13] Management studies extended this to organizational behavior, while psychology emphasized nonconscious heuristics driving surrogate substitution.^[2] Philosophical ties to Baudrillard’s simulacra concept emerged in discussions of hyperreal metrics, where performance indicators simulate and supplant authentic strategic constructs in postmodern organizational settings.^[14] Key milestones marked this evolution. In 2013, Choi, Hecht, and Tayler followed up by demonstrating that manager involvement in strategy formulation reduces surrogation, as active participation fosters deeper cognitive alignment between measures and strategic intent, beyond mere exposure to incentives.^[9] As of 2024, surrogation enjoys recognition in leading outlets like the Journal of Management Accounting Research, with ongoing contributions exploring its cognitive underpinnings, including neurocognitive studies using tools like fMRI to validate behavioral findings and probe neural mechanisms of surrogate substitution.^[12]^[2]

Theoretical Foundations

Links to Cognitive Psychology

Surrogation exemplifies the attribute substitution heuristic, a cognitive process in which individuals unconsciously replace a difficult target judgment with an easier-to-evaluate proxy attribute, often due to the relative accessibility of the latter.^[15] In this framework, as outlined by Kahneman and Frederick, the target attribute—such as the abstract strategic value of a business initiative—is substituted by a concrete measure, like financial metrics, because evaluating the former requires substantial cognitive effort while the proxy offers a path of least resistance.^[14] This substitution occurs nonconsciously, driven by the mind's preference for cognitive ease, where the proxy's simplicity leads managers to treat it as equivalent to the original construct rather than an imperfect representation.^[15]^[14] The role of cognitive load further amplifies this reliance on surrogates, particularly when assessing high-complexity constructs like long-term strategic objectives. Under increased cognitive demands, individuals default to simpler, more salient measures to reduce mental strain, triggering nonconscious substitution without deliberate intent.^[14] For instance, when evaluating multifaceted goals such as innovation impact, the brain shifts to quantifiable proxies like cost savings, as the former's ambiguity heightens processing load and favors heuristic shortcuts.^[14] Experimental evidence demonstrates that elevating cognitive effort—through tasks requiring deeper analysis—diminishes surrogation, underscoring how load modulates the heuristic's activation.^[14] Once established, surrogation interconnects with other cognitive biases, notably confirmation bias and anchoring, which entrench the proxy's dominance and resist corrective efforts. Confirmation bias manifests as individuals selectively attend to data affirming the surrogate's validity while ignoring discrepancies with the target construct, thereby perpetuating the substitution.^[14] Similarly, anchoring occurs when the initial proxy value sets an undue reference point, biasing subsequent judgments toward it even when evidence suggests misalignment.^[14] These biases compound the nonconscious nature of surrogation, making reversal challenging without explicit interventions to disrupt the heuristic chain. Neurocognitive research provides preliminary insights into the brain mechanisms underlying surrogation, implicating regions associated with heuristic processing and abstract reasoning. Functional MRI studies reveal heightened activation in prefrontal cortex areas—particularly those involved in executive control and semantic processing—when distinguishing concrete measures from abstract targets, with greater activity correlating to reduced surrogation.^[12] This suggests that effortful cognition in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can override automatic substitution, as concrete proxies elicit less neural demand than vague strategic concepts.^[12] However, empirical neuroimaging on surrogation remains limited, with gaps in longitudinal studies exploring how repeated exposure to proxies alters these pathways over time.^[12]

Relation to Incentive Structures

In organizations, performance incentives tied to proxy metrics often lead managers to prioritize these measures over underlying strategic objectives, resulting in strategy surrogation. Research demonstrates that when compensation is linked to a single performance indicator, such as sales volume, managers exhibit a heightened propensity to substitute the metric for the true goal, treating it as an end in itself rather than an imperfect proxy. This effect is particularly pronounced in incentive structures where rewards are directly contingent on measure achievement, causing suboptimal strategic choices that favor short-term metric gains (Choi, Hecht, & Tayler, 2012).^[6] The mechanism amplifying surrogation under incentives involves cognitive dissonance arising from the conflict between reward pursuit and awareness of the metric's limitations. Incentives increase the salience of the performance measure, creating psychological tension as individuals recognize that optimizing the proxy may diverge from broader goals. To alleviate this dissonance, decision-makers resolve the inconsistency by reframing their beliefs, effectively surrogating the measure by equating it with the strategic construct and justifying actions aligned with it over true objectives (Bentley, Lambert, & Taylor, 2019).^[11] Both financial and non-financial incentives contribute to this dynamic by elevating the measure's perceived value. Financial incentives, such as bonuses or stock options awarded for meeting targets like revenue growth, directly motivate focus on proxies through monetary rewards. Non-financial incentives, including promotions based on performance evaluations incorporating such metrics, similarly foster surrogation by tying career progression to measure outcomes, thereby reinforcing substitution behaviors across incentive types (Choi, Hecht, & Tayler, 2012; Campbell, 2008).^[6]^[16] From a theoretical perspective, surrogation mediates the pathway from incentives to distorted decision-making by channeling heightened measure reliance into belief adjustments that prioritize proxy optimization. Incentives first amplify attention to the metric via reward structures; surrogation then intervenes as a cognitive process, where the proxy supplants the objective, culminating in decisions—such as strategy selection—that undervalue unmeasured dimensions and compromise overall performance (Choi, Hecht, & Tayler, 2012).^[6]

Empirical Research

Foundational Studies

The foundational empirical research on surrogation began with the 2012 study by Choi, Hecht, and Tayler, which experimentally demonstrated how incentive compensation linked to performance measures induces managers to substitute proxies for strategic constructs. In their experiment, MBA students served as participants and evaluated business strategies in a controlled task involving strategy assessment; when compensation was tied to specific measures, surrogation significantly increased, as participants increasingly relied on the measures rather than the underlying strategy objectives.^[6] This effect was attributed to the heightened salience of incentives, which amplified attribute substitution, leading to distorted strategic judgments.^[6] A follow-up study by Choi, Hecht, and Tayler in 2013 extended this work by examining whether involving managers in strategy selection mitigates surrogation. Participants, again MBA students, engaged in tasks where they either selected or were assigned a strategy before evaluating performance; the results showed that active involvement in selection significantly reduced surrogation compared to assignment conditions, with statistical significance confirmed through regression analyses (p < 0.05).^[9] This reduction was mediated by enhanced strategic understanding, as measured by post-task comprehension checks, highlighting the role of participatory processes in preserving strategic intent.^[9] Methodologically, these foundational studies established vignette-based experimental paradigms as a core approach, where participants make judgments on hypothetical strategic scenarios and surrogation is quantified via regression models regressing evaluations on measure values versus holistic strategy assessments.^[6]^[9] Such designs allow isolation of incentive effects while controlling for confounding factors like task complexity. Early implications from these studies underscored that surrogation persists even when participants are explicitly informed of the risk, as awareness alone did not eliminate the bias in control groups.^[6]^[9] This persistence emphasized the need for structural interventions beyond education to address proxy substitution in performance systems.

Recent Empirical Findings

A 2019 experimental study by Bentley demonstrated that cognitive dissonance plays a key role in driving surrogation, as individuals committed to a particular action become insensitive to unmeasured aspects of the task, leading them to prioritize surrogate measures. In this research, participants engaged in a chess-based task where they made decisions under incentives tied to imperfect measures; providing narrative disclosures allowed participants to explain their actions, reducing surrogation by restoring sensitivity to broader objectives and decreasing operational distortion by up to 50% in treatment conditions compared to controls.^[11] The experiment, involving experienced decision-makers analogous to executives, highlighted how contextual explanations mitigate the psychological tension that reinforces measure substitution. Building on this, a 2020 survey-based study by Reinking et al. of 214 executives revealed intentional dashboard design as a mechanism for inducing strategy surrogation in organizations, where upper management curates performance metrics to align operational activities with strategic goals without explicit incentives. Respondents reported that dashboards synthesizing enterprise data from multiple sources facilitated surrogation by 62% in high-alignment scenarios, linking directly to improved perceived performance outcomes; however, this intentionality also raised concerns about over-reliance on curated measures at the expense of holistic evaluation.^[17] The findings, drawn from U.S. firms across industries, underscored how dashboard characteristics like interactivity and visual salience promote substitution even in non-incentivized contexts, with control groups showing baseline surrogation rates around 28%. Post-2021 research has extended these insights through neurocognitive approaches, including a 2023 fMRI study by Vance et al. that examined brain activation during measure processing tasks. Participants exhibited heightened activity in concrete-processing regions (e.g., left fusiform gyrus) when evaluating surrogate measures versus abstract strategic objectives, correlating with reduced surrogation propensity; response times increased by 15-20% in low-surrogation conditions, indicating greater cognitive effort to discern measure-construct misalignment.^[18] This heuristic activation pattern was consistent across samples, replicating earlier behavioral findings and suggesting surrogation as an automatic cognitive shortcut. A 2023 study by Libby and Lindsay further showed that weighting performance measures and providing relative performance information can reduce surrogation in experimental settings.^[3] Emerging trends from 2022-2025 studies highlight persistent gaps in cross-cultural validity, with preliminary evidence indicating varying surrogation rates (e.g., higher in individualistic cultures) but limited generalizability due to U.S.-centric samples.^[18]

Applications and Examples

Business and Management Contexts

In business and management contexts, surrogation frequently arises through the proliferation of key performance indicators (KPIs) that serve as proxies for more complex organizational goals. For instance, metrics such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) are commonly adopted as surrogates for customer loyalty, providing a quantifiable snapshot of satisfaction via a single survey question that categorizes respondents as promoters, passives, or detractors.^[19] Similarly, employee engagement indices, often derived from periodic surveys measuring factors like job satisfaction and commitment, act as surrogates for overall morale and retention, despite their inability to fully capture underlying cultural or motivational dynamics. This metric proliferation simplifies evaluation but risks oversimplification, as managers prioritize optimizing these indicators over addressing the nuanced realities they represent.^[20] Strategic misalignment often emerges in performance management systems where short-term surrogates supplant long-term objectives. Quarterly earnings reports, for example, become surrogates for sustainable value creation, pressuring executives to focus on immediate financial results at the expense of investments in research, employee development, or market expansion that yield benefits over years.^[21] Such practices can distort decision-making, as incentive structures tied to these metrics amplify the tendency to surrogate, leading to behaviors that boost reported figures but undermine enduring strategic health. Research highlights this as a pervasive issue in corporate governance, where rigid adherence to financial proxies erodes alignment with broader mission-driven goals.^[3] Industry variations illustrate surrogation's adaptability to sector-specific priorities. In finance, risk metrics like Value at Risk (VaR) serve as surrogates for overall stability, enabling rapid assessments of potential losses but potentially overlooking tail risks or systemic vulnerabilities that require qualitative judgment.^[22] In the technology sector, user engagement metrics—such as daily active users or session duration—act as surrogates for innovation, guiding product decisions toward features that maximize immediate interaction rather than fostering groundbreaking advancements that may not show short-term uptake.^[3] Healthcare organizations similarly employ patient volume as a surrogate for care quality, tracking admissions or procedure counts to gauge efficiency, yet this can incentivize throughput over personalized outcomes like recovery rates or patient well-being.^[23] Across these domains, surrogation manifests as a common byproduct of performance measurement systems, with studies indicating its prevalence in evaluation processes based on experimental data from management accounting research.^[24]

Notable Case Studies

One prominent example of surrogation in corporate practice is the Wells Fargo fake accounts scandal, which unfolded primarily between 2011 and 2016 but came to light in 2016.^[25] The bank's aggressive cross-selling strategy relied on sales quotas and metrics, such as the number of products per customer account, as surrogates for genuine customer relationships and long-term satisfaction.^[26] These metrics incentivized employees to open approximately 3.5 million unauthorized accounts in total, including deposit and credit card accounts, without customer consent, prioritizing numerical targets over ethical service delivery.^[27] The pressure from these quotas, enforced through performance reviews and compensation ties, fostered a culture where employees resorted to fraudulent practices to meet goals.^[28] Regulatory fallout included a $185 million settlement in 2016 with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Los Angeles City, followed by a $3 billion criminal and civil penalty in 2020 from the Department of Justice.^[25]^[27] This case has been analyzed in management literature as a cautionary tale of surrogation, where surrogate metrics distorted strategic intent and eroded trust.^[20] Retrospectively, the 2001 Enron collapse illustrates how overreliance on stock price as a surrogate for overall company health can precipitate systemic fraud.^[29] Enron executives, heavily compensated through stock options and bonuses tied to share performance, manipulated financial statements using mark-to-market accounting and special purpose entities to inflate reported earnings and sustain a rising stock price, which had peaked at $90.75 per share in August 2000.^[29]^[30] This surrogate focus masked underlying debt exceeding $13 billion and operational weaknesses, leading to a rapid stock plunge to $0.26 by late 2001 and the company's bankruptcy filing on December 2, 2001, amid revelations of accounting irregularities.^[29] The scandal resulted in the conviction of key figures, including CEO Jeffrey Skilling on fraud charges, and prompted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to enhance financial oversight.^[31] Enron's downfall underscores how stock price surrogation can incentivize short-term manipulations at the expense of sustainable value creation.^[29] In the aviation sector, Boeing's handling of the 737 MAX program from 2011 to 2020 exemplifies surrogation through production and certification metrics that supplanted rigorous engineering integrity assessments.^[32] To compete with Airbus's A320neo, Boeing prioritized rapid certification and cost efficiencies, using simplified metrics for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software as a surrogate for comprehensive flight stability testing, which concealed design flaws.^[33] This approach contributed to two fatal crashes: Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018, killing 189 people, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019, killing 157, prompting a global grounding of the 737 MAX fleet for 20 months.^[34] Investigations revealed a corporate culture emphasizing schedule adherence and financial metrics over safety redundancies, leading to regulatory actions including a $2.5 billion settlement with the Department of Justice in 2021 for fraud conspiracy. However, following a 2024 incident involving a mid-cabin door plug failure on a 737 MAX 9, the Department of Justice deferred the 2021 agreement and filed new criminal charges. As of November 2025, a federal judge dismissed the criminal case and approved an additional $1.1 billion in fines and compliance investments by Boeing, though victims' families filed an appeal on November 13, 2025.^[32]^[35] The episode highlighted the perils of surrogating procedural shortcuts for engineering thoroughness, resulting in over $20 billion in costs to Boeing and lasting scrutiny from the Federal Aviation Administration.^[36]

Mitigation and Implications

Strategies to Reduce Surrogation

One effective approach to mitigating surrogation involves adopting a multiple measures strategy within performance management systems, where complementary metrics are used alongside primary indicators to prevent over-reliance on a single proxy. This method encourages managers to consider the broader strategic construct rather than substituting it with isolated performance data, as demonstrated in experimental settings where incentives tied to multiple measures significantly lowered surrogation compared to single-measure incentives.^[6] By incorporating diverse indicators, such as quantitative outputs combined with qualitative assessments like employee surveys or operational feedback, organizations can better align decisions with underlying goals, reducing the cognitive shortcut of attribute substitution inherent in surrogation.^[9] Another strategy emphasizes narrative and contextual reporting, which integrates explanatory stories or qualitative narratives with numerical metrics to preserve focus on the true strategic objectives. Research shows that allowing managers to provide unverifiable narrative explanations for their decisions decreases both operational distortion and surrogation, as narratives serve as "cheap talk" that reinforces awareness of the construct beyond the measure.^[37] For instance, in performance evaluations, appending contextual descriptions to dashboard metrics helps counteract the psychological tendency to equate the proxy with the goal, fostering more holistic decision-making in dynamic environments.^[3] Participatory design in metric selection further reduces surrogation by involving stakeholders in choosing and refining performance indicators, thereby enhancing ownership and reducing the likelihood of proxy substitution. Studies indicate that when managers participate in strategy selection processes, they exhibit lower surrogation effects, as this involvement promotes deeper understanding of the strategic constructs and their measures.^[9] This collaborative approach, often implemented through workshops or cross-functional teams, builds collective awareness of potential biases, leading to more robust performance systems that prioritize the intended outcomes over simplistic heuristics.^[3] Training interventions represent an emerging method to address surrogation by educating managers on recognition of cognitive heuristics and debiasing techniques, though empirical evidence in organizational contexts remains limited as of 2025. These programs, drawing from cognitive psychology principles, aim to heighten awareness of attribute substitution mechanisms, potentially through targeted workshops that simulate decision scenarios and reinforce strategic alignment.^[3]

Broader Organizational Impacts

Surrogation can lead to the erosion of strategic alignment within organizations, as managers prioritize easily measurable performance indicators over broader strategic objectives, resulting in suboptimal decision-making that deviates from intended goals. For instance, excessive focus on cross-selling metrics contributed to ethical lapses at Wells Fargo, where employees created approximately 3.5 million unauthorized accounts to meet targets, exemplifying how surrogation fosters short-termism and undermines long-term value creation.^[38] Surrogation may also stifle innovation by encouraging adherence to quantifiable proxies that overlook creative or unmeasurable contributions essential for competitive advantage. Systemically, surrogation can propagate through organizational hierarchies via performance measurement systems, influencing decision-making from operational levels to boardrooms and embedding a culture of metric-driven behavior that prioritizes compliance over adaptability. Experimental evidence indicates this propagation can impose a performance drag, as surrogation reduces alignment with core objectives and lowers overall effectiveness in tasks requiring nuanced judgment.^[6] Despite these drawbacks, surrogation can offer benefits when intentionally designed in stable environments to simplify complex goals and foster focus. Research on digital dashboards demonstrates that executives may deliberately engineer surrogation to align operational activities with strategy, enhancing performance through clear, proxy-based guidance without overwhelming managers with abstract constructs.^[17] In such contexts, this approach streamlines decision-making and improves outcomes by providing concrete representations of strategic priorities.^[39] Looking ahead, significant research gaps persist regarding the long-term effects of surrogation on organizational sustainability, particularly how chronic metric substitution influences resilience in volatile markets. Scholars have called for advancements in accounting standards to incorporate safeguards against unintended surrogation, such as mandating multifaceted measurement frameworks to preserve strategic fidelity.^[3] While mitigation strategies like measure aggregation can help counter these effects, broader policy integration remains essential to address systemic risks.^[3]

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