http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/26486/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/37373/ 2012-10-05T00:00:00Z Management accountants are choice architects: they provide information that is used in managerial decision making and they have considerable influence on the monetary and non-monetary incentives that drive managers’ decision-making processes. Over the past two decades, our know - ledge of how people make economic decisions has increased tremendously. However, this has had only very little impact on the design of management accounting and control systems in organizations. Consequently, management accounting is (again) at risk of becoming irrelevant. To secure its relevance, management accountants need to become aware of their role as choice architects and need to develop into professionals whose core competence is to provide insight into quantitative information as a product of human decision making and, vice versa, to explain and predict decision-making behavior as a response to quantitative information. Academic management accounting research should facilitate this development. How this can be done is illustrated using three examples of practically relevant research areas: subjective performance evaluation, internal transparency and the design of the control function in organizations. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/32841/ 2012-03-01T00:00:00Z This paper investigates managerial discretion in compensation decisions in a team setting, in which a measure of the team's aggregate performance is readily available from the accounting system. Specifically, we examine the willingness of managers to obtain additional, costly information that would supplement this measure and allow the managers to more accurately assess individual contributions to team output. Using theory from behavioral economics that incorporates social preferences (i.e., fairness and trust reciprocity) into the managers' utility function, we predict and demonstrate experimentally that managers' willingness to obtain the costly information increases as the team's aggregate performance becomes a more noisy measure of individual performance. Further, we predict and demonstrate that managers' willingness will be greater for relatively high versus relatively low levels of aggregate performance. The study contributes to the literature on subjective performance evaluation by identifying how social preferences influence managers' use of discretion in evaluation processes. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT] http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/30882/ 2011-12-01T00:00:00Z This paper explores how contextual uncertainty and the use of the budgetary system explain cross-sectional variation in the organisational role of business unit controllers. We argue that there are complementarities between the role of the budgetary control system (i.e. coercive vs. enabling) and the role of the controller (i.e. corporate policeman vs. business partner). Thus, we explore both the direct effect of uncertainty on the role of the controller and the indirect effect through the role of the budgetary control system. Using survey data from 134 business unit controllers, we find that uncertainty provides a partial explanation of the variation in the role of budgetary control systems and in the role of controllers. In particular, our data suggest alignment between the coercive (enabling) use of the budgetary control system and the role of controllers acting as corporate policemen (business partners). These findings add to our understanding of the functioning of business unit controllers within their organisational context. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/26089/ 2011-09-01T00:00:00Z Deze studie besteedt aandacht aan de gevolgen van de financiële crisis voor het prestatiemeetsysteem van een onderneming. Vanwege de financiële crisis hebben veel ondernemingen naast langetermijndoelstellingen ook een aantal kortetermijndoelstellingen geformuleerd die betrekking hebben op hun liquiditeit (kaspositie). In dit artikel gaan we in op de vraag hoe de balans tussen korte termijn (cash) en lange termijn (waardecreatie) tot uitdrukking kan komen in het prestatiemeetsysteem van organisaties. We beschrijven de aanpak van een Nederlandse multinational, DSM, die naar aanleiding van de crisis een nieuwe waardemaatstaf is gaan hanteren. Aan de hand daarvan is een nieuw integraal prestatiemeetsysteem ontwikkeld met specifieke subdoelstellingen, dat het bereiken van zowel de korte- als langetermijndoelen moet waarborgen. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/25752/ 2011-07-01T00:00:00Z Gender discrimination continues to be a problem in organizations. It is therefore important that organizations use performance evaluation methods that ensure equal opportunities for men and women. This article reports the results of an experiment to investigate whether and, if so, how the gender of the rater and that of the ratee moderate the relationship between the level of subjectivity in performance appraisals and organizational attractiveness. Participants in the experiment were 313 undergraduate students. We predicted, and indeed established, that as the probability increases that employee performance is evaluated by a female manager, women expect more positive outcomes of subjective, but not objective evaluation processes. Our data did not support our expectation that as the probability of being evaluated by a female manager increases, men expect less positive outcomes of subjective evaluation processes. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of why women are over-represented in jobs with objective formula-based reward systems, such as piece-rate systems. They are also of interest to organizations that are looking for more ethical human resource management practices. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/21355/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z This paper investigates business unit (BU) controllers' inclination to engage in the creation of budgetary slack. In particular, we explore whether controllers who are involved in BU decision making are more susceptible to social pressure to engage in slack creation than controllers who are not. We expect, and find, a crucial role of the controller's personality. Results from an experiment among 136 management accountants suggest that the personality construct Machiavellianism interacts with involvement to explain controllers' responses to social pressure to create budgetary slack. Controllers scoring high on Machiavellianism are more likely to give in to pressure by BU management to create budgetary slack when they have been involved in decision making. In contrast, controllers scoring low on Machiavellianism are less likely to give in to pressure to create slack when they have been involved in decision making http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/21356/ 2009-12-01T00:00:00Z Although management accounting innovations such as Activity-Based Costing, the Balanced Scorecard and benchmarking have received much academic interest in recent years, our understanding of why some organizations adopt and implement such new management accounting systems (MAS) and others do not, is still underdeveloped. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the role of the CFO in MAS innovation. We hypothesize that individual differences between CFOs are predictive of organizations' use of innovative MAS. In addition, we propose that CFO characteristics moderate the extent to which organizations rationally adapt to (environmental) contingencies. To examine this second prediction we compare the effects of strategy and historical performance on the adoption of innovative MAS for organizations with different types of CFOs. We test our hypotheses using a combination of archival and survey data from the public health care sector in Spain. Our results are generally supportive of our hypotheses. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/25758/ 2009-07-01T00:00:00Z We examine how business unit (BU) controllers balance their dual roles of providing information for both local decision-making (local responsibility) and cor porate control (functional responsibility). The existing literature suggests that organi zations can improve the quality of financial reporting and internal controls by increasing the emphasis on the functional responsibility of BU controllers. In this study, we rely on prior literature and insights from field interviews to argue that such an increase also leads to role ambiguity and conflict, which in turn can lead to an increased tolerance of data misreporting. We test our predictions using survey responses of 134 BU con trollers. As predicted, we find that the emphasis on the functional responsibility of BU controllers is positively associated with role conflict and role ambiguity, both of which are related to data misreporting at the BU level. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/31812/ 2009-03-01T00:00:00Z Dit artikel beschrijft een onderzoek naar de effecten van de keuze van prestatiemaatstaven op de bonus die managers krijgen uitbetaald. Voortbouwend op recent management accounting onderzoek wordt gekeken of managers die beoordeeld worden aan de hand van meer maatstaven of aan de hand van niet-fi nanciële en individuele maatstaven een groter deel van hun maximale bonus weten binnen te halen dan managers die alleen op geaggregeerde fi nanciële resultaten worden afgerekend. De hypotheses worden getoetst met behulp van data uit de jaarrekeningen van Nederlandse ondernemingen. Deze data blijken de voorspellingen van ons theoretisch model niet te ondersteunen.