Within- and Between-group Agreement in Supervisor’s Evaluative Behaviours: Do evaluative ‘styles’ exist?

Several management accounting studies have investigated the behavioural impact of evaluative style, a concept that generally refers to the manner in which supervisors use accounting information to evaluate the performance of subordinates. Although most studies study this behavioural impact at the individual level of the subordinate, the term “evaluative style” suggests that evaluative behaviours and attitudes of single supervisors will show (some) consistency across subordinates. This paper investigates whether “evaluative styles” exist by examining within-group and between-group agreement in evaluative behaviours by subordinates reporting to the same supervisor. The findings from two empirical studies indicate that evaluative behaviours in both organisations show both within-group and between-group variability. These findings suggest that evaluative behaviours of supervisors are more appropriately analysed at the level of individual subordinates than at the level of groups, although a dyadic level of analysis should be considered as well. An implication of these findings is that the concept of “evaluative style” is misleading. A suggestion is made to use the term “evaluatorship” instead as an umbrella concept to refer to evaluative behaviours and attitudes of supervisors at different levels of analysis in future research.