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This study aims to examine the mediating role of organisational fairness on the association between the emphasis on budgets and budget difficulty with budget value and job stress. Data were collected using an online survey questionnaire with 515 responses from middle and lower-level managers in Australian business organisations. The results indicate that organisational fairness fully mediates the association between budget difficulty with both budget value and job stress. Organisational fairness was not found to mediate the association between the emphasis on budgets with budget value and job stress. Rather, the emphasis on budgets was significantly negatively associated with job stress, implying that a greater emphasis on budgets is desirable in alleviating job stress. The findings have important implications for practice.

This study uses a path analytic model to investigate the influence of fairness (i.e., procedural fairness, distributive fairness, and interactional fairness) on managers’ budget satisfaction and the influence of managers’ budget satisfaction on budget performance. To this end, data from 92 U.S. individual managers are used for the study. The results show that fairness perceptions have a significant positive impact on budget satisfaction which, in turn, positively affects budget performance. Further analyses indicate that budget satisfaction mediates the relationship between fairness measures and budget performance. The implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate on the usefulness of institutional theory to critical studies. It pursues this topic by exploring some of the possibilities for allocating local authority funds more fairly for poor residents. This paper aims to shed light on the institution of budgeting in a democratically elected local government under austerity.

This paper uses world culture theory, the study of the devolution of cultural authority to individuals and organisations through which they turn into agentic actors. Based on a field study of Newcastle City Council’s (NCC’s) budget-related practices, the paper uses the notion of actorhood to explore the use of fairness in austerity budgets.

This paper documents how new concerns with fairness gave rise to new local authority practices and gave NCC characteristics of actorhood. This paper also shows why it might make sense for a local authority that is managing austerity budget cuts and cutting back on services to make more detailed performance information public, rather than attempting to hide service deterioration, as some prior literature suggests. This paper delineates the limits to actorhood, in this study’s case, principally the inability to overcome structural constraints of legal state power.

The paper is suggestive of ways in which local government can fight inequality in opposition to central government austerity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first qualitative accounting study of actorhood. It coins the phrase fairness assemblage to denote a combination of various accounting technologies, organisational elements and local government practices.

Empirical evidence from governmental budgeting and related organizational decision‐making contexts suggests that program heads will be less likely to leave their governmental unit when they feel that governmental budgeting is fair. The purpose of this study is to examine relationships between three forms of fairness in governmental budgeting – distributive fairness, procedural fairness, and interactional fairness – and program heads' intention to leave the governmental unit.

Questionnaire data were gathered from 87 US federal government program heads with budget responsibility and analyzed with multiple regression.

Interactional budgetary fairness had a significant and positive unique relationship with intent to leave after controlling for the other two forms of budgetary fairness and three demographic variables. Neither distributive budgetary fairness nor procedural budgetary fairness had a significant unique relationship with intent to leave.

Budgetary decision makers and budget staff in governmental units can reduce program heads' intention to leave the governmental unit by promoting interactional budgetary fairness through steps such as treating the program heads with kindness and respect during budgeting and providing clear and adequate explanations for budgetary decisions.

This study is the first to examine relationships between the three forms of organizational decision‐making fairness and turnover intention in a governmental budgeting context.

Program heads are key players in governmental budgeting because they are involved both in formulating their program’s budget and ensuring the program’s activities comply with the budget. This paper synthesizes past research pertaining to two aspects of a government’s budgeting system-formal budgetary procedures fairness and budgetary procedures implementation fairness-that influence program heads’ attitudes and behaviors. Criteria are identified for each of the two forms of budgetary procedures fairness, as are specific types of attitudinal and behavioral reactions on the part of program heads. Reasons that program heads value fair budgetary procedures are also discussed. The paper concludes by presenting implications the research has for people involved in designing and implementing governmental budgeting systems and for governmental budgeting researchers.

Drawing on equity theory, social exchange theory and goal setting theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the contingencies on the link between employees’ budgetary participation and their work performance. Specifically, this study addresses the research questions: whether vertical information sharing and budget goal commitment mediate the relationship between employees’ budgetary participation and their work performance; and whether employees’ perceived budget fairness can strengthen the positive effects of budgetary participation on vertical information sharing and budget goal commitment.

Survey data were collected from a sample of 556 low to middle level managers of business organizations in Vietnam. The research model and its hypotheses were tested using PLS-SEM. The standardized root mean squared residual value of the composite model was employed to assess model fit. Common method bias was also checked using the marker-variable approach.

This study has two key findings: both vertical information sharing and budget goal commitment partially mediate the positive effects of budgetary participation on work performance; and both dimensions of perceived budget fairness (distributive and procedural) elevate the positive relationships of budgetary participation – vertical information sharing and budgetary participation – budget goal commitment.

The findings could benefit businesses in Vietnam and similar market contexts. Specifically, top management needs to select a proper level of budgetary participation that can facilitate information sharing vertically within the organization and motivate their employees to be more committed to achieve budget goals. Besides, the top management also needs to ensure that their employees perceive the fairness in the budgeting process.

The study contributes a greater understanding as regards the mediating roles of vertical information sharing and budget goal commitment as well as the moderating role of perceived budget fairness on the relationship between employees’ participation in the budgetary process and their work performance, especially in the context of an emerging market – Vietnam. Overall, this study contributes to the management and accounting literature with insights concerning a more complex process explaining employees’ work performance and triggered by their budgetary participation.

This study revisits the area of reliance on budget to evaluate employee performance. It contributes in several ways. First, it updates this traditional research area making it more relevant to the current debate on the use of financial vis-à-vis nonfinancial measures in multidimensional performance measurement systems. Second, it examines the relationship between reliance on budget and budgetary participation in a manner that is different from that used by prior studies. Instead of treating budgetary participation as a moderating variable, the study examines it as a mediating variable. Specifically, the study hypothesizes that reliance on budget as performance measures affects the extent of employee budgetary participation. Third, it incorporates the recent interest by management accounting researchers in organizational fairness into this research area. It hypothesizes that budgetary participation affects the extent of employees’ perceptions of procedural fairness, which, in turn, influences employee job satisfaction and performance. The structural equation modeling results based on a sample of 152 managers indicate that the use of budget targets for performance evaluation is positively associated with employee job satisfaction and performance. However, much of these effects are indirect via (1) budgetary participation and (2) procedural fairness.

This study examines how leadership style, budget participation, and perceptions of budgetary fairness influence an important employee outcome, organizational commitment. In the proposed model, the leadership style of the superior, specifically consideration, is linked to subordinate participation in the budgeting process. Both leadership style and budget participation, in turn, influence employee beliefs about budgetary fairness, that is, beliefs concerning the procedural and distributive justice of the budgeting system. Finally, the justice of the budgeting system and its antecedents (leadership and budget participation) affect organizational commitment. Results from a survey of supervisors and managers in several firms support the proposed model.

Prior studies in accounting argue that subordinates have private information about their areas of responsibility and that revelation of such information benefits the organization. This study investigates factors that encourage subordinates to share this information with their superiors during the budgeting process. According to the proposed theory, the fairness of the budgeting system, specifically its procedural justice, influences the degree of information sharing. If the subordinate believes that budgeting procedures are fair, the subordinate is more likely to disclose private information during the budgeting process.

We conduct an anonymous survey of supervisors and managers in four companies. Regression model is developed with information sharing as the dependent variable. Independent variables include procedural justice of budgeting system and also budget participation and organizational commitment, variables that prior studies have identified as important in information sharing.

Results support the proposed model in general. The three independent variables (procedural justice, budget participation, commitment) interact in their effect on information sharing.

Results suggest that companies that seek the private information of subordinates should consider the fairness of the budgeting system. Fair procedures encourage information exchange.

This study contributes to the management accounting (MA) literature by exploring the effect of managers’ perception of justice in the budgeting process (as a subsystem of MA) on their satisfaction and motivation to achieve organizational objectives. Drawing on the Habermasian concept of deliberative democracy, which underscores the importance of gaining legitimacy to achieve desirable outcomes, our analysis focuses on seven constructs related to situational and intrinsic participation, procedural and distributive justice, and attitude on two outcome constructs: satisfaction and motivation. We surveyed managers with an accounting background who are directly involved in the budgeting process and analyzed our data using partial least squares-based path analysis–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results of this study indicate that both dimensions of justice – distributive and procedural – are positively associated with participation, and in turn, positively impact satisfaction and motivation. Contrary to expectations, managers’ influence on the final budget does not seem to be as important as we expected. Budgeting is an important managerial function that involves setting targets based on an organization’s strategy and allocating resources for its execution. Such a fundamental process requires managers’ participation at various levels to ensure that the process is fair and just. Our study’s findings imply that justice perceptions are an essential fabric of organizational processes that drive human behavior. Specifically, our findings reveal that perception of justice influences participation and satisfaction and motivation.