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The interplay between accounting and organisational change has been a topic of considerable interest in recent years. This paper is concerned with exploring the ways in which managers’ attitudes towards budgets may be influenced by processes of organisational change. Traditionally a high reliance on accounting measures of performance has generally been associated with provoking unfavourable reactions from managers on account of the pressure they experience to meet pre‐determined budgetary targets, with concomitant dysfunctional consequences for the achievement of organisational objectives. In contrast the paper argues that processes of organisational change, particularly the increasing use of “stretch” targets and empowerment strategies, may be prompting a more positive disposition towards budgets amongst managers. Drawing on recent research evidence, and building on notions of “psychological empowerment”, the paper suggests that managers may value the existence of pre‐determined budgetary targets as an “empowerment facilitator” in conditions of uncertainty. This possibility opens up new directions in behavioural accounting research.

The purpose of this study is to explain how factors relating to resource availability affect managerial risk-taking with regard to the geographic and institutional proximity of cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) targets. The paper further considers the impact of organizational learning by testing the moderating effect of the acquiring firms’ prior international M&A experience.

This study uses linear regression with robust standard errors to account for dependence among clustered observations at the firm level. The authors used country and industry fixed-effects specifications to account for unobserved heterogeneity.

The results suggest that when internal and external resources are more abundant, firms pursue cross-border M&As that are more geographically and institutionally distant. The findings further indicate that a firm’s prior international M&A experience positively moderates the aforementioned relationships..

Extending the behavioral theory of the firm beyond organizational slack resources, the results highlight the importance of taking a multi-level, open-systems perspective of the strategic impact of resource availability. The authors’ theory and findings also provide a more nuanced view of the critical role organizational learning plays in the relationship between resource availability and organizational outcomes.

This is the first study to the authors’ knowledge that develops and tests a theoretical model exploring the impact of both internal (organizational slack) and external (environmental munificence at both the industry and home-country levels) resource availability, as well as prior organizational experience on an important multinational business practice.

This study aims to investigate three organizational-level factors (geographical proximity, technological similarity and organizational identity integration) that influence the likelihood of post-mergers and acquisition (M&A) joint knowledge creation between inventors from the target and acquiring firms.

Analyzing post-M&A joint patent filing activities from 136 M&A deals in high-tech industries, the authors conduct a zero-inflated negative binomial regression analysis to estimate the likelihood of joint knowledge creation.

The results indicate that close geographical proximity and technological similarity are positively associated, whereas the integration of organizational identity is negatively associated with post-M&A joint knowledge creation.

Managers searching for an ideal acquisition target firm for joint production of new technologies or products should consider factors such as location, prior knowledge base and post-acquisition integration strategies.

The proposed model is a comprehensive framework that considers physical, cognitive and identity dimensions as antecedents of post-M&A joint knowledge creation. This study analyzes joint patenting activities to measure post-M&A joint knowledge creation between target and acquiring firm inventors.

The impact of workplace violence on occupational stress and well being is garnering increasing attention. Despite the fact that workplace violence has been identified as a critical organizational safety and health issue, there has been limited scholarly focus on the problem of domestic or intimate partner violence in the workplace. This paper examines intimate partner violence from both ecological and work family spillover modes of theorizing. Within this framework, we propose that the effects of intimate partner violence are reciprocal and spillover into the workplace, impacting employee and organizational well being. We conclude by discussing the implications of the integrated framework and by offering suggestions for future research in this area.

This chapter examines performance management, which has arguably been the kernel of New Public Management inspired version of public sector reform. The first part is a literature review that looks at experiences of performance management in both developed and developing countries. It looks at the difficulty in transferring public sector reforms from developed to developing countries. This is followed by the evaluation of performance management in the post-1994 public service in South Africa. Both the individual and organisational performance systems are highlighted, followed by an analysis of performance management reforms. There is a well-developed performance management system but the empirical data and qualitative reports found that it has not worked particularly well. There are concerns around a number of issues, including the measurement of targets; the signing of performance targets; a focus on outputs rather than outcomes; a lack of harmonisation between individual and organisational performance; a lack of capacity of managers, which in some cases is due to unskilled patronage appointments; a focus on compliance rather than performance; and a lack of accountability.

The recent increase in the presence of emerging market firms (EMFs) in global markets requires a closer examination of their international marketing strategies (including branding). The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors behind the standardization or adaptation of global marketing strategies adopted by EMFs for their cross-border acquisitions.

This paper examines the determinants of the marketing strategies adopted by Indian and Chinese firms for their cross-border acquisitions. The drivers of the standardization/adaptation of marketing strategies (including branding) are identified using both quantitative data collected in 168 cross-border acquisitions conducted by the EMFs mentioned above and the institutional theory and organizational identity literature.

Institutional factors have a stronger effect than organizational identities on global marketing strategies, including branding. The standardization of the EMFs’ marketing strategies is driven by the private statuses of the acquirers, legal distances, target countries’ economic development, and the ethnic ties that exist between the home and host countries. The acquirers’ decisions to retain the targets’ brand identities, thus adapting their global marketing strategies, are related to the cultural distances, economic freedom distances, and sizes of the targets.

In this study, two large emerging markets – India and China – are used to gather the empirical data; future works can expand upon this line of research and examine other EMFs.

The acquiring companies have to decide whether to adopt an adaption marketing strategy, with reference to the acquired targets’ local stakeholder requirements, or to incorporate their targets’ brands into their own global marketing strategies.

Typically, previous work on the adaptation vs standardization of global marketing strategies adopted in the wake of cross-border deals has focussed on acquisitions involving companies from developed countries; this paper extends the field of research to the EMFs of two of the most important developing countries: China and India.

This study aims to comprehensively examine the integration of organisational- and individual-level performance management systems (PMSs) in the context of public sector organisations (PSOs) of developing countries (DCs), by investigating the elements of PMSs in the studied organisation.

A case study in a large PSO of a developing country was conducted. The design of the study and the data analysis drew on Ferreira and Otley’s PMSs framework. Data were captured from electronic and printed document archives, online written interviews with participants and face-to-face interviews. The data then were triangulated and analysed thematically.

The study reveals a recursive relationship between culture and PMSs, and identifies conflicting regulatory requirements and a lack of information technology capacity led to the development of dual, loosely coupled PMSs in the studied organisation.

The findings may not be generalisable beyond a large, PSO in a developing country; the study did not consider the linkages between the integration of organisational- and individual-level PMSs and other PMSs; the study looked at only two notions of culture; and the study asked participants to recall past events, so was retrospective in its design.

The findings illustrate the need for public sector managers and key policymakers to use both formal and informal control systems, together with technical and social integration mechanisms, as well as management accounting (MA) and human resources management (HRM) control approaches, when attempting to integrate organisational- and individual-level PMSs in the PSOs of DCs.

Future studies may usefully investigate the integration of organisational- and individual-level PMSs in different contexts, consider culture and contextual factors when investigating the integration of organisational- and individual-level PMSs in different contexts, examine whether national culture also substantially impacts PMSs in other countries and attempt to inform the MA literature by drawing on HRM theory and research on individual-level PMSs. Such studies may help to address the gap between PMS theory and practice and better allow MA researchers to contribute to practice.

The study contributes to management control systems (MCSs) and PMSs literature by extending our understandings in the relationship between accounting and non-accounting controls, the contextual factors that affect PMSs and highlighting the importance of considering cultural context when integrating PMSs in the PSOs of DCs.

This paper develops an argument about how contentious changes unfold in organizational fields, focusing on the role of uncertainty – and the networks people use to address uncertainty. We propose that as controversial practice gains traction and spreads, the nature of uncertainty facing organizational decision makers also evolves. This dynamic has important implications for how different actors and networks can influence change. We illustrate our argument with a mixed-methods case study on the diffusion of domestic partner benefits across US Fortune 500 companies. Our findings shed light on how – and when – social activists, corporate elites, and middle managers can influence the corporate decision-making process.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that promote the successful adoption of lean practices in manufacturing firms operating in developing economies in South America.

Based on the results obtained from using structural equation modeling to analyze the collected data, the authors argue that manufacturing organizations need to identify the factors that assist in successfully adopting lean practices in manufacturing firms operating in developing economies in South America. A dataset of 1,809 responses, gathered from manufacturing firms as part of the World Management Survey, was used to find support for the proposed hypotheses.

Several hypotheses were tested finding that lean practice success factors such as organizational targets proved to have a significant and positive relationship with the mediating factor, performance management. Likewise, performance management was also found to have a significant and positive relationship with lean practices adoption. Human capital management (HCM) has a significant but negative predictive relationship with lean practices.

The empirical results of this study provide valuable managerial insights. The results are therefore limited to the economies analyzed and to the variables surveyed as part of the World Manufacturing Survey research.

The results of this research provide a starting point for researchers to continue studying the key lean practice factors and relationships in the achievement of improved performance management, thereby helping managers in developing strategies to improve the lean capabilities of their practices. This, in turn, will increase the organization's competitive advantage sustainably.

This paper identifies and tests the impact of key factors on successful lean practices adoption in South American organizations in the manufacturing sector.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the curvilinear relationship between perceived negative workplace gossip and target employee’s task performance, and the moderating roles of perceived organizational support (POS).

Using a sample of 275 supervisor–subordinate dyads in a two-wave survey, the authors adopted a hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

The results revealed that there is a U-shaped relationship between perceived negative workplace gossip and task performance. Moreover, POS moderated the curvilinear relationship such that the curvilinear relationship is more pronounced among those with lower POS.

This study does not explore the mediating mechanism of how perceived negative gossip affects the target’s task performance. Moreover, as this research was conducted in a Chinese context, the question of the generalizability of the findings calls for more attention.

When the negative gossip is still in its early stages, managers should realize the potential threat to target employees and take measures to stop and minimize negative gossiping and rumormongering. Furthermore, managers should do their best to find the optimal levels of organizational support for target employees.

This study is among the first effort to understand how perceived negative gossip can influence the target employees’ performance by proposing and demonstrating a nonlinear relationship. Moreover, by illuminating how POS plays a role in the curvilinear relationship between negative gossip and task performance, the authors not only complement but also extend the literature on workplace gossip and organizational support.