Surrogation is a psychological phenomenon in which the measure(s) of a construct of interest evolve to replace the construct itself. Research on performance measurement in management accounting has identified surrogation as "the tendency for managers to lose sight of the strategic construct(s) the [performance] measures are intended to represent, and subsequently act as though the measures are the constructs of interest" An everyday example of surrogation is a manager tasked with increasing customer satisfaction who begins to believe that the customer satisfaction survey score actually is customer satisfaction.[1]
