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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the simultaneous effect of management control system (MCS) designs (belief vs boundary) and cognitive orientations (individualism vs collectivism) on performance misreporting by combining accounting and psychology literature.

This paper is based on a laboratory experiment with 67 postgraduate students.

Results show that an individualist cognitive orientation increased performance misreporting. The results also showed that a boundary design of MCS intensified the relationship between individualist orientation and performance misreporting.

This paper shed some light about the role of non-pecuniary control system for reducing managerial performance misreporting. The findings support that the tendency of individuals to avoid misreporting depends not only on the MCS design but also on the match between it and individual’s cognitive orientations.

Managers in organizations should consider the predominant cognitive orientation of individuals when they design MCS. They should consider that control systems, which impose coercive constraints to individuals, may encourage feelings of psychological reactance and then increase performance misreporting.

This study is among the first to combine psychology and accounting literature to analyze how the design of MCS influences individuals’ motivation to misreport their performance. It provided evidence about the effect of non-monetary control systems on individual’s behavior in organizations.

The purpose of this study is to test various hypotheses regarding if managers' voluntarily prefer honesty in self-reported managerial performance (HPR).

This study uses an experimental approach with a data set of 300 Ghanaian employees.

The results confirm that the current trend where employee contracts are underpinned by the classical agency theory (CAT) is problematic, ineffective and costly because it does not appropriately explain the observed behaviour of honesty and partial honesty in self-reported performance or the dishonesty in reporting performance when there is no financial reward to be gained by employees. Therefore MNCs may benefit from a consideration of wider and alternative perspectives. Additionally, stakeholders must consider a strategy of delaying performance-related bonuses (pay-offs) to improve HPR and avoid capping performance-related pay off with an arbitrary threshold. This is because the setting of arbitrary thresholds reduces the established relationship between effort and reward and introduces gaming into the managerial performance reporting process.

Unlike other prior studies that rely on students as surrogates for employees, this study uses actual employees to test the experimental constructs. Aside from the comparatively large data set, this study is the first exploration of the differential effects of national characteristics on HPR in Ghana.

This paper provides an overview of the empirical findings on how relative performance information (RPI) affects employee behavior. Additionally, the review identifies future research opportunities based on a systematic analysis of the literature that incorporates findings across several disciplines and provides replicable, extensive coverage.

This paper addresses a research gap via synthesis, drawing on the empirical literature identified and analyzed systematically. A conceptual framework is developed to integrate the studies.

The effect of RPI on performance through enhanced effort is positive; moreover, publicity and performance-dependent compensation strengthen the effect. However, RPI has also been found to increase sabotage among employees, and it can lead to less honest reporting. Future research could examine critical mediators and moderators of the RPI-performance relationship and thus complement the findings. Additionally, the effects of group-based RPI remain underrepresented. Future work could help to assess in greater detail how RPI interacts with culture and norms and whether RPI is due to personal expectations. There is also room for further research regarding the effects of RPI on cooperation, its consequences for learning, how it affects budgeting decisions and its implications for risk taking.

This paper presents the first literature review in the field of RPI. It provides synthesized knowledge about whether RPI is beneficial or detrimental to organizational performance.

This paper aims to enrich our understanding of whether mandatory IR adoption lures firm into misreporting or forces them to reduce it.

The empirical analysis is carried out based on the sample containing all publicly listed firms in South Africa. Many different rigorous econometric techniques are adopted to thoroughly evaluate whether corporate misreporting practices increase or decrease following the mandatory adoption of IR.

The empirical results reveal that mandatory IR disclosure results in a decline in the misreporting practices of firms. The authors further find that as firms increasingly comply with the IR guidelines, especially with the “Content Elements” and “Guiding Principles,” their misreporting levels decrease.

This study has implications for a wide range of stakeholders, especially for regulatory authorities, international policymakers and regulators, as well as users of integrated reports of listed firms on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE).

Regulatory authorities should be aware of misreporting determinants to set adequate and fitting corporate reporting standards that restrict the opportunistic behaviour of managers and amend IR guidelines to make them more comprehensible for integrated report preparers, therefore improves the implementation of IR.

This study sheds light on the current state and consequences of IR adoption in South Africa before and after the mandatory IR disclosure requirement, thus, international policymakers and regulators can refer to the critical aspects in our findings when considering whether to support IR mandatory adoption in their markets.

This paper sheds light on the emerging debate over the usefulness of IR and the necessity of mandatorily adopting this new reporting framework. In addition, by showing that the mandatory adoption of IR significantly reduces corporate misreporting practices, we also contribute to the literature on corporate misreporting behaviour.

This study aims to explore the main features of managerial performance reporting (MPR) in Ghana and applied a national social-cultural framework to understanding the MPR practices.

It is a qualitative study based on responses from mid-level managerial employees within the top companies in Ghana dubbed Ghana Club 100 (GC100). GC100 includes a balanced mix of companies across varied industry classifications and local and multinational companies (MNCs). This enriches the data and deviates from similar studies that have usually relied on data from multinational companies.

There is evidence that while MPR practices in Ghana do not significantly deviate from western approaches, the underlying reasons for such managerial practices and actions may defer on national socio-cultural lines. This study discusses how various cultural attributions explain the features and motivations for MPR practices in Ghana, including a difference in expectations about the purpose of an MPR.

MNCs must be guided by the findings of this study in their drive to inculcate standardised practices across organisations. It is also essential for MNCs to appreciate the more than usual reliance on verbal cues and symbols in interpreting the appropriate course of action. Regulators must consider systematic activities that reduce the tension and suspicion between them and business actors to improve information transparency. Whistleblowing schemes, while helpful, may not be effective because organisational agents within MPR practice consider themselves part of an “in-group” and manage their dissonance through categorisation, rationalisation and superficial attention to standards. Because of the excessive use of unwritten cues, auditors must consider visits to the client’s operational premises and other independent observation efforts vital to their evidence gathering process.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is among the first to evaluate MPR practices based on direct responses from “persons close to the MPR action” rather than the current overreliance on secondary data sources such as content analysis.

Purpose – We investigate the impact of CEO turnover on performance and accounting-based outcomes following major business restructurings.

Design/Methodology/Approach – We analyze a sample of 217 major operational restructurings during the period 1999–2007 using regressions and other statistical tests.

Findings – We document significant improvements in postrestructuring operating and investment efficiencies with little differentiation between restructurings that involve a change in CEO and those that involve continuing CEOs. However, we find evidence of lower accounting quality for the continuing CEO firms. First, restructuring charges of CEO turnover firms are associated with lower current period unexpected core earnings and higher future period unexpected core earnings (lower levels of classification shifting). Second, CEO turnover firms have a significantly lower percentage of (i) restructuring charge reversals and (ii) prereversal shortfalls (in meeting analyst forecast estimates) followed by reversals (suggesting lower levels of subsequent earnings management). Therefore, turnover CEOs are less likely to manipulate restructuring charges to mask true economic performance than continuing CEOs. Overall, our evidence suggests continuing CEOs undertake less substantial restructurings, while opportunistically reporting similar charges and performance improvements, consistent with attempts to pool with new CEO hires to keep their jobs.

Originality/Value – Overall, our results highlight the key economic role played by top corporate managers in major business restructurings, suggesting that CEO turnover leads to both real changes in managerial actions and altered reporting incentives.

This paper aims to provide a systematic review of literature pertaining to how executive behavioral characteristics relate to financial reporting decisions.

The authors review 44 papers published between 2001 and 2021 in top journals that are nested in leading business, economic and accounting journals.

Through the systematic review, the authors provide a framework for the emergence of narcissism and how it relates to decision making and hence, firm performance. Additionally, this paper identifies different measures of measuring narcissism with their pros and cons and suggest that different measures lead to different outcomes in prior literature.

The study contributes to a growing stream of research on executives' attributes influence on decision making. The authors recommend that future research may focus more on the chief financial officer (CFO) role as the majority of literature in CEO based. Additionally, the authors suggest that different settings may moderate the outcomes, and the authors propose that future research may be conducted to show how the regulatory environment affects or moderates narcissism effect.

We use a laboratory experiment to examine a multitask environment common to practice, in which managers have multiple responsibilities, including both managerial reporting, as in participative budgeting settings, and effort provision toward daily tasks. Consistent with typical contracting arrangements, we examine incomplete contracts where honesty and effort are not enforceable. In such a multitask environment, when employers choose to offer comparatively generous wages to managers, we predict that managers will elect to provide higher effort. Meanwhile, we remain agnostic ex ante about the degree of misreporting due to findings in studies on gift exchange, moral licensing, and moral wiggle room. Overall, we find evidence that reciprocity, consistent with the gift-exchange model, does extend across both tasks. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the antecedents of inconsistent responding in web surveys. Consistency of responses to personal information questions and scale items were compared, and the influence of perceived social support, social appearance anxiety, academic self-efficacy and social networking habits on inconsistent responding was examined.

A gaming application on Facebook was used to collect data. A repeated-measures design was conducted with 806 respondents in two online survey administrations. After inconsistent responses provided by the same nicknames were identified, consistent and inconsistent respondents were compared with regard to their responding patterns and research variables.

Findings revealed that 45.7 percent of participants misreported their personal information such as age, educational status and gender. Participants were relatively consistent in their responses to attitude scales. Perceived social support led to inconsistent responding whereas social appearance anxiety and academic self-efficacy was not influential in response patterns. A binary logistic regression revealed that perceived family support, number of Facebook friends and Facebook use duration successfully distinguished inconsistent respondents from consistent respondents.

The sample frame has several limitations insofar as the study only addressed a unique gaming application on Facebook. Thus, unique interactive characteristics of the current context may have altered the nature of responding.

Practitioners should not rely on the personal information provided by online survey respondents to conduct parametric tests, whereas responses to online attitude scales seemed relatively consistent.

The principal contribution of the paper is that findings have provided insights into the current status of response patterns in online survey administrations. In addition, the paper highlights the importance of individual variables which influence the consistency of responses.

The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis that there are correlations between campus sustainability initiatives and environmental performance, as measured by resource consumption and waste generation performance metrics. Institutions of higher education would like to imply that their campus sustainability initiatives are good proxies for their environmental performance.

Using data reported through the Association for the Advancement in Higher Education’s Sustainability Tracking and Rating System (AASHE STARS) framework, a series of univariate multiple linear regression models were constructed to test for correlations between energy, greenhouse gas (GHG), water and waste performance metrics, and credit points awarded to institutions for various campus sustainability initiatives.

There are very limited correlations between institutional environmental performance and adoption of campus sustainability initiatives, be they targeted operational or coordination and planning best practices, or curricular, co-curricular or research activities. Conversely, there are strong correlations between environmental performance and campus characteristics, namely, institution type and climate zone.

Institutional decision makers should not assume that implementing best practices given credit by AASHE STARS will lead to improved environmental performance. Those assessing institutional sustainability should be wary of institutions who cite initiatives to imply a certain level of environmental performance or performance improvement.

This is the first paper to use data reported through the AASHE STARS framework to assess correlations between campus initiatives and environmental performance. It extends beyond previous research by considering energy, water and waste performance metrics in addition to GHG emissions, and it considers campus sustainability initiatives in addition to campus characteristics.