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In 2001, we gathered a group of researchers in Nice, France to focus discussion on performance measurement and management control. Following the success of that conference, we held subsequent conferences in 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009. This volume contains some of the exemplary papers that were presented at the most recent conference. The conference has grown in number of participants, quality of presentations, and reputation and this year attracted leading researchers in the field from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa.

This book collects representative papers from the sixth conference on Performance Measurement and Management Control held in Nice, in September 2011. The conference has been running every two years since 2001 with increasing participation each edition. The number of participants as well as the quality of the papers highlight the relevance of this topic in the evolving world of organizational management.

In 2001, we gathered a group of researchers in Nice, France to focus discussion on performance measurement and management control. Following the success of that conference, we held subsequent conferences in 2003, 2005, and 2007. This volume contains some of the exemplary papers that were presented at the most recent conference. The conference has grown in number of participants, quality of presentations, and reputation and this year attracted leading researchers in the field from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa.

Over the last decades, the accounting and control literature has featured much studying of and debate about the role and designing of incentives. Over the last year or so, the debate over incentives and bonuses has become a much more public one, as illustrated by the current public furor over bankers' bonuses and frequent calls to limit them and/or tax them more heavily. The public nature of the debate is new, but the emotional intensity is not; an intense emotionality has often characterized discussions of these subjects in print, as recently illustrated by a controversy between supporters and opponents of goal setting published in Academy of Management Perspectives.

This chapter tries to structure the debate by defining – and clarifying the interactions between – key components of the debate. I then review some – by no means all – of the evidence available in three streams of research: goal setting, self-determination theory, and economics. A surprisingly large number of commonalities emerge from this review. I then revisit in light of this review two accountability models I had introduced at a previous conference as well a forthcoming field study of the sophisticated approach developed by a successful multinational corporation.

Kerr's (1975) examination of the “folly of rewarding A while hoping for B” led him to encourage organizations to align reward system and desired employee behavior. Since then, much of the accounting and control literature has increasingly reduced the reward system to one of its components – incentive compensation plans – and has increasingly ceased to examine other behavioral levers used by corporations, thus implicitly or explicitly treating measurement and reward as a sufficient condition to obtain desired employee behavior. This chapter considers the complexity of the reward system (including its inevitable subjective dimension) and discusses its role, in connection with other important managerial levers, in corporations’ broader efforts to shape employee behavior. The chapter concludes with a review of literature streams in economics and psychology, suggesting that an intense incentive alignment approach may be self-fulfilling and hence counter-productive.

Purpose – This chapter reviews the challenges faced by top management teams as they strive to create corporate cultures that combine a high performance with a strong sense of integrity.

Methodology/approach – The chapter integrates diverse theories from organizational research and cognitive psychology, as well as published accounts of ethical breakdowns, to shed new light on the barriers to corporate integrity.

Findings – The chapter distinguishes between two major types of ethical breakdowns.

Conscious transgressions, where the individuals know what they should or should not do, but choose nonetheless to follow the unethical path, a decision that they then need to rationalize and which often places them on a slippery slope.

Unconscious transgressions, where the individuals do not even realize that they are making an inappropriate decision, as they fall prey to ethical fading or to other cognitive biases.

Practical implications – The chapter proposes that top management plays a key role in establishing a climate where employees can speak up, emphasizing the importance of all stakeholders, and investing in training to increase awareness of the cognitive biases that support transgressions.

Social implications – The chapter recommends that management educators must alert students more forcefully to the personal and organizational repercussions of “minor” ethical transgressions; increase student awareness of key cognitive concepts, including ethical fading and other mental biases; and highlight the possible dysfunctions of intuitive remedies, like incentives or rules and regulations.

Originality/value of chapter – The chapter provides a clearer analysis of the causes of ethical breakdowns, allowing for more effective prevention.