This paper extends the nonabelian Hodge correspondence for Kaehler manifolds to a larger class of hermitian metrics on complex manifolds called balanced of Hodge-Riemann type. Essentially, it grows out of a few key observations so that the known results, especially the Donaldson-Uhlenbeck-Yau theorem and Corlettes theorem, can be applied in our setting. Though not necessarily Kaehler, we show that the Sampson-Siu Theorem proving that harmonic maps are pluriharmonic remains valid for a slightly smaller class by using the known argument. Special important examples include those balanced metrics arising from multipolarizations.