Advances in Management Accounting: Volume 13

Advances in Management Accounting (AIMA) is a professional journal whose purpose is to meet the information needs of both practitioners and academicians. We plan to publish thoughtful, well-developed articles on a variety of current topics in management accounting, broadly defined.Advances in Management Accounting is to be an annual publication of quality applied research in management accounting. The series will examine areas of management accounting, including performance evaluation systems, accounting for product costs, behavioral impacts on management accounting, and innovations in management accounting. Management accounting includes all systems designed to provide information for management decision making. Research methods will include survey research, field tests, corporate case studies, and modeling. Some speculative articles and survey pieces will be included where appropriate.AIMA welcomes all comments and encourages articles from both practitioners and academicians.Review Procedures AIMA intends to provide authors with timely reviews clearly indicating the acceptance status of their manuscripts. The results of initial reviews normally will be reported to authors within eight weeks from the date the manuscript is received. Once a manuscript is tentatively accepted, the prospects for publication are excellent. The author(s) will be accepted to work with the corresponding Editor, who will act as a liaison between the author(s) and the reviewers to resolve areas of concern. To ensure publication, it is the author’s responsibility to make necessary revisions in a timely and satisfactory manner.

This volume of Advances in Management Accounting (AIMA) begins with a paper by Jacob G. Birnberg. This thought-provoking article is based on the author’s keynote address delivered at the First AIMA Conference on Management Accounting Research: New Paradigms and Methodologies which was held in Monterey, California, May 15–16, 2003. As the title of the paper indicates, it is about expanding management accounting research frontiers in the next decade. According to Birnberg, the management accounting research cycle has been one of importing new ideas from other disciplines followed by a period of introspection when the new ideas are integrated into the fabric of management accounting research and practice. This prominent scholar claims there are good reasons to believe that management accounting is again at the point where it should look outside its own research domain for new ideas. His paper proposes several areas where management accounting researchers may find new, interesting and productive research. Within these areas a variety of specific research topics are suggested and potential research questions are raised.

The cycle in research in management accounting has been one of importing new ideas from other disciplines followed by a period of introspection when the new ideas are integrated into the fabric of management accounting research and practice. There are good reasons to believe that management accounting is again at the point where it should look outside its own research domain for new ideas.

This paper proposes several areas where management accounting researchers may find new, interesting and productive research. Within these areas a variety of specific research topics are suggested and potential research questions are raised.

Many corporations have annual expenditures in research and development in the range of billions of U.S. dollars. Senior managers have often been frustrated by the lack of innovation in their organizations and have been looking for better ways to implement an innovation strategy. To provide initial evidence on this significant topic, we conduct an empirical examination and contribute to the existing literature in two important areas. First, we examine how managers choose what measures to pay attention to in managing the innovation process – defined as the process of creative definition, development, and commercialization of substantially new products, services or businesses. We find that managers use measures about specific phases of the innovation process together. For example, measures that inform about the execution stage of the innovation process are grouped together rather than being grouped with measures informative about other phases of the innovation process, such as market performance. This pattern “focused” around specific phases is in contrast to the alternative “balanced” pattern where managers would use measures from various phases of the process together. This result provides the first empirical test of how managers combine measures to filter information about business processes. It also provides important new evidence on the use of measures and provides guidance to the design of measurement systems. Second, this paper provides empirical evidence on the relationship between innovation strategy and the use of measures. Though previous studies have linked innovation strategy and the use of management control systems in general, there is little empirical data on the relationship of strategy and the use of measures and on the innovation process. We find that different dimensions of strategy are positively associated with how managers use different types of measures.

The current study examines the performance effects of financial incentives for a simple, recurrent task designed to simulate an assembly-line setting. The study looks at early performance, improvement and overall performance. For a new task, performance-based incentives appear to improve the initial performance of the task but not subsequent improvement rate (Bailey et al., 1998). The current paper reports on a laboratory experiment whose results confirm the findings of Bailey et al. (1998) but also indicates that for both performance-based and fixed incentives, significant performance improvement takes place well beyond the initial performance of the task, declining gradually over time. This is in contrast with the suggestion of Bailey et al. (1998) that workers with performance-based incentives will choose to improve initial performance rather than subsequent performance. Findings also suggest that improvement peaks earlier for performance-based incentives than for a fixed incentive. Improvement persisted longer and there was better overall performance with the high fixed component quota and piece rate incentives than with the low fixed component quota implying that incentives that impose higher risk (e.g. a low fixed component quota incentive) on workers result in de-motivation and lower performance.

Product mix and the acquisition of the assets needed for their production are interdependent decisions. However, these decisions are frequently evaluated independently of each other and with conceptually different decision models. This article expands activity-based costing (ABC) to incorporate the cost of capital. The resulting model traces the cost of capital to products and thereby measures the economic value added (EVA) from their production. The discounted value of a product’s EVA over its life is equivalent to its net present value (Hartman, 2000; Shrieves & Wachowicz, 2001). The discounted EVA of a product also equals the net present value of the assets used to manufacture the product. Consequently, evaluating products with an ABC model incorporating the cost of capital enables product mix and capital budgeting decisions to be evaluated simultaneously. The article also examines the role of ABC when product mix decisions are made at the product and portfolio levels of the firm’s operations.

In 1998 and 1999, the Office of Student Financial Assistance of the Department of Education and the Patent and Trademark Office of the Department of Commerce, were designated as Performance-Based Organizations (PBOs), respectively. This paper examines the transformation progress of the agencies, as they attempt to convert to high-performing organizations by utilizing and establishing new and more flexible systems of performance-oriented business practices and processes.

The paper compares and contrasts the different approaches and tools used to improve management and organizational performance, as well as concentrate on human resources, procurement, budget, customer service, and internal controls. The document explores whether or not these agencies have improved their performance as a result of these flexibilities and examines the organizational and cultural challenges encountered as the agencies move from a restrictive and bureaucratic system, to a more liberal system of management and internal controls.

The Performance-Based Organizations (PBOs) concept is to have federal agencies focus on the customer, deliver high quality products, and devise more efficient operations. Therefore, the paper further examines whether or not the PBO legislation has been effective in changing the performance of federal organizations by granting administrative and managerial flexibilities aligned with corporate (agency) strategies, performance, and pay.

This study extends Quirin et al. (2000) by incorporating equity theory (Adams, 1965) into a theoretical model of budgetary participation and performance. The study develops and tests a nomological framework of budgetary participation that includes two organizational constructs, budgetary participation and budget-based compensation, and three individual characteristics, perception of equity, organizational commitment, and employee performance. Measures of these constructs were gathered from a sample of 98 employees in 15 organizations.

In accordance with the proposed theory and hypotheses, results reveal that budgetary participation is associated with increased use of budget-based compensation as well as higher levels of perception of equity and organizational commitment. Budget-based compensation and perception of equity, in turn, are also associated with increased levels of organizational commitment, while elevated commitment was related to higher performance. The results provide further insight into the beneficial aspects of budgetary participation. Specifically, the results indicate that budgetary participation is positively associated with perception of equity, which in turn increases organizational commitment and, ultimately, employee performance.

Large organizations typically mandate that managers attend budget meetings and exchange budget reports with their immediate supervisor and budget staff. We explored whether such organization-mandated budgetary involvement is related to managers’ budgetary communication with their supervisor in terms of budgetary participation, budgetary explanation, and budgetary feedback. Questionnaire data from 148 managers employed by 94 different companies were analyzed with regression. Mandatory budget meetings with supervisor had a positive relationship with all three forms of budgetary communication with supervisor, and mandatory budget reports from supervisor had a positive relationship with budgetary explanation from supervisor. Mandatory budget meetings with budget staff had a positive relationship with both budgetary participation with supervisor and budgetary feedback from supervisor. Mandatory budget reports from budget staff had a negative relationship with all three forms of budgetary communication with supervisor. The results failed to support proposed relationships between mandatory budget reports to supervisor and budgetary participation with supervisor, and between mandatory budget reports from supervisor and budgetary explanation from supervisor. Implications of the results for future research and budgetary system design are discussed.

Prior experimental budgeting research has focused primarily on individuals’ budget setting and little experimental research has examined budgeting in a group setting. Using a controlled experiment, this study extends prior participative budgeting research by examining the effects of aggregation levels of performance feedback and task interdependence on budgetary slack and the effects of different levels of feedback on group performance in a group participative budget setting.

The results suggest that aggregation levels of performance feedback differentially impact budgetary slack and group performance. Providing both group and individual performance feedback increases group performance and reduces budgetary slack compared to providing group performance feedback only. Providing information about other subordinates’ performance further increases group performance and reduces budgetary slack beyond the effects of providing individual workers information only about their own performance. The results indicate that task interdependence also affects the level of budgetary slack. Specifically, high task interdependence groups created more budgetary slack than did low task interdependence groups.

Prior research demonstrates a positive relationship between information asymmetry and managers’ use of budgetary slack and thereby suggests that minimizing managers’ private information is a potential tactic for reducing slack in budgets. Asymmetric information, however, often cannot be avoided when specialized technical expertise is required to operate a particular responsibility area. This study contributes to the literature by investigating whether favorable perceptions of fairness mitigate managers’ use of budgetary slack during participative environments in which managers hold private information. Overall, the findings demonstrate the benefits of fair budgeting practices. In particular, survey results suggest that the presence of budgetary slack in efficiency targets is lower for managers who hold favorable fairness perceptions. A gender effect is also demonstrated between perceptions of fairness and the presence of budgetary slack in spending targets. Factor analytical evidence toward the development of a more refined measure of budgetary slack is provided.

This paper reports the results of an experimental study examining the joint effect of two group characteristics, responsibility and cohesiveness, on escalation of commitment in an ongoing unsuccessful project. Two levels (high/low) of group responsibility and group cohesiveness were manipulated to examine their effects on group escalation decisions. Forty-eight 3-member decision groups were formed and randomly assigned to four treatment cells with 12 groups in each cell. The results of a 2×2 ANOVA reveal a significant main effect of responsibility on escalation of commitment, as well as a significant interaction of responsibility and cohesiveness. Specifically, groups with both high responsibility and high cohesiveness committed the largest amount of resources to an ongoing unsuccessful project. These results provide support for the proposition that group responsibility and cohesiveness exert significant joint effects on group escalation of commitment in an ongoing unsuccessful project. The findings suggest that periodic changes of group membership to shift responsibility and cohesiveness may generate new attitudes and views to reduce group escalation of commitment.