Search results

Recently, there has been an increase in the number and type of studies in the organizational sciences that examine curvilinear relationships. These studies are important because some relationships have context-specific inflection points that alter their magnitude and/or direction. Although some scholars have utilized basic techniques to make meta-analytic inferences about curvilinear effects with the limited information available about them, there is still a tremendous opportunity to advance our knowledge by utilizing rigorous techniques to meta-analytically examine curvilinear effects. In a recent study, we used a novel meta-analytic approach in an effort to comprehensively examine curvilinear relationships between destructive leadership and followers' workplace outcomes. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an actionable guide for conducting curvilinear meta-analyses by describing the meta-analytic techniques we used in our recent study. Our contributions include a detailed guide for conducting curvilinear meta-analyses, the useful context we provide to facilitate its implementation, and our identification of opportunities for scholars to leverage our technique in future studies to generate nuanced knowledge that can advance their fields.

More frequent re‐forecasting is becoming an important topic on corporate agendas and is seen by many to be the only way to keep financial performance on track at a time when revenues are becoming less predictable. The paper aims to investigate this topic.

For the past four years ALG Software has commissioned a study of the re‐forecasting practices in a sample of the top organisations in the UK by revenue. The objective of the study is to benchmark how frequently the UK's leading organisations currently re‐forecast and what their goals are for the future.

The results show that the majority of organisations remain dissatisfied with the frequency with which they re‐forecast and wish to re‐forecast more frequently. However, the findings also show that many organisations feel that they cannot re‐forecast as often or as quickly as they would like. In fact, evidence suggests that little, if any, progress has been made during the last four years since this survey was first commissioned. This is due to either the amount of time it takes operational line managers to re‐forecast their resource requirements, or the amount of time it takes the finance function to complete a round of re‐forecasting. The type of application used for budgeting and re‐forecasting appears to make little difference to the time it takes organisations to produce an annual budget or complete a re‐forecast. Central to this issue is the use of non‐financial or “operational” data that predicts future resource requirements, and the limitations of the budgeting systems that organisations currently employ. Regardless of the type of application used for budgeting or re‐forecasting, much of this modelling is still done off‐line on spreadsheets.

The paper is of value to finance managers considering choosing a new budgeting application who will need to ensure that the type of operational modelling of non‐financial driver data, currently done offline on spreadsheets by line managers, can be seamlessly integrated into the central budgeting model.

In the growing debate about designing new management control systems (MCS) to include stakeholder values, there has been little discussion about information overload. Stakeholder advocates call for including more environmental and related social disclosures but do not consider how information overload might impair the use and interpretation of corporate performance measures. As we know, shareholders and boards of directors are most concerned with market data such as earnings per share, dividend rates, and market value growth. In this chapter, we assert that management control system designers must consider information overload before expanding the MCS to include social and nonfinancial disclosures.

The paradox in expanding MCS is that demand for sustainability performance measures will likely result in overload for both information preparers and information users. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and similar sustainability disclosures are likely to overload MCS and overwhelm the readers and users by performance reports that include multiple dimensions.

CSR affects the design of companies' annual reports because stakeholders are increasingly concerned with how organizations address their social responsibilities and how they disclose their societal responses. Management accountants are accustomed to providing performance measures within an organization and MCS usually have an internal focus. CFOs are often not accustomed to balancing the needs of stakeholders with those of managers and owners. We suggest that companies and CFOs will face an information overload dilemma in making these determinations, and that users will be overloaded in sifting through the multiple dimensions of information that are increasingly being provided. We suggest that the bias toward financial performance measures will distort both the provision of relevant information and the use of sustainability performance measures. We modified the Epstein and Roy sustainability model (2001) to illustrate some of these potential impacts.

We note that the balanced scorecard (BSC) was developed as one such tool to reflect and communicate multiple measures. We summarize a previous study showing how managers ignored multiple performance measures in a performance scorecard study. We then relate our results to some of the information overload literature to support our suggestion that stakeholders will face many of the same information overload issues and constraints when using and processing social disclosures.

Our summary of the information overload literature results in a call for more interdisciplinary information overload research involving real-world contexts and tasks. We note that most of the extant information overload literature is restricted to discipline-based silo-oriented studies and to simplistic evaluations, brand identification, or forecasting tasks. Our study went into some depth to describe the business, its strategies and objectives, and a comparison of actual results to specific goals. As management control systems evolve or are designed to report sustainability data, the issues surrounding increasing complexity and information overload will become exponentially problematic. We suggest that future research also include consideration of information overload conditions facing preparers and disclosers of sustainability measures.

This study aims to explore and understand a beyond budgeting-inspired initiative to abandon budgeting in a multinational bank.

Analysing data from semi-structured interviews with actors involved in and affected by the change initiative, this paper draws on Kasurinen’s accounting change framework as well as concepts from institutional theory to investigate the rationale for and the challenges of budget abandonment.

Although the improving financial market stability and the increasing accountability of banks after the global financial crisis motivated the initial organisational changes, the appointment of a head of finance with experience of beyond budgeting was a major catalyst of change. This change-promoting leader was of utmost importance in providing relevant training and support, facilitating the change initiative and overcoming the initial resistance to change. However, the remnants of former budgeting practice did not regress as intended, and the change initiative stalled.

This research contributes to beyond budgeting and accounting change studies by illustrating a stalled change initiative in the context susceptible to beyond budgeting ideas and highlighting the importance of aligning discourse and meaning with practice and routines.

This paper aims to explore the implications for the way organizations develop leaders when decision making is delegated closer to the front line.

The paper explores this theme using the National Trust as a case study.

Conventional distinctions between “management” and “leadership” become blurred and potentially misleading when front line managers become more accountable for local performance. In addition, a blend of interventions is required to develop skills at various leadership levels, ranging from technical to personal, and group‐based to individually tailored.

The case study is based on a charity and ignores the implications for fiduciary duties for directors and trustees. In addition, the paper does not include a review of the definition of devolved or delegated decision making. Finally, the case study is ongoing and the final results from the work will not be evident for up to two more years.

Devolving responsibility in a charity is a rare and courageous initiative, given the broad array of stakeholders and level of public scrutiny. Given this challenge, private and public sector organizations can benefit from this experience and identify ways to engage their own stakeholders in the practical leadership development implications of a similar decision.

As the world jumps from the Industrial Age to the Information Age in what is, from a historical sense, a cultural nanosecond, the very concept of work is morphing at Warp 13 speed, the Information Revolution is coursing through the veins of corpus corporatus, having as significant an effect on the American workplace as did Ford's assembly line. The principal currency of the new workplace—what one knows and what one does with that knowledge—is effectively splitting the nation's workforce into two social classes. A professional class (“information brokers”) holds the skeleton key to the executive bathroom, while a service class is increasingly relegated to the broom closet. As the ability to manipulate data emerges as the new definition of skilled labor, blue‐collar workers, who represented the heart of the postwar middle class, are fast becoming an endangered species. With polarization of the workplace accelerating into the next millennium, the parachutes most likely to open will be those somehow connected to managing information.

This article has two main parts. First, the aim of the paper is to give a brief overview of the major developments in management control over the past 50 years and attempt to draw out some abiding themes that have arisen from the work that has been conducted. Second, it will examine one of the more recent issues in more detail, namely managing under conditions of uncertainty, and outline the contribution that management control systems research can make.

This is a conceptual paper.

The primary aim is to suggest areas for research that are likely to be both relevant and fruitful in the future. It represents a personal point of view, and is in no sense a comprehensive review of the literature, but rather attempts to draw out some important themes that are worthy of further study and development.

The paper will be of use to those seeking to design research studies in performance management.