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This paper presents paradox theory as a useful theoretical lens for researchers exploring crises such as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The authors argue that paradox theory, which emphasizes a “both/and” as opposed to an “either/or” approach, is ideally suited for management control systems (MCS) research on crises.

The authors adopt a revelatory case approach to provide empirical examples of the insights that paradox theory can provide.

This paper highlights how MCS can be used to simultaneously manage short-term/operational and long-term/strategic objectives to navigate a crisis. Furthermore, it highlights how MCS can be mobilized during crises to identify and embrace opportunities.

This paper illustrates the importance of MCS focusing on not just the short-term, but also the long-term, and managing multiple objectives in assisting organizations to survive crisis.

This paper highlights the benefits of using paradox theory to understand the role of MCS in helping organizations manage crises and to use a crisis as a source of opportunity.

Managers are confronted with increasing information overload and growing pressure for effective and efficient decision making. The visualisation of data represents a way to overcome this dilemma and to improve management decision quality. The purpose of this paper is to transfer insights from visualisation research to the managerial accounting context and clarify the impact of visualisation on management accounting reports and decision making. The authors deduce implications for behavioural management accounting research, teaching, and business practice from previous findings and the results.

The authors conducted an experiment with students and experienced managers. Participants had to evaluate eight different business units based on four accounts (sales, EBIT, FPY, and delivery reliability). The information the authors provided to the participants was either presented as tables only, or in tables and graphs.

The empirical results show that supplementary graphs improve decision quality, especially within the manager sample but do not affect decision confidence in a performance evaluation task. The authors furthermore find that managers perform poorly when only provided with tables, and they achieve the overall best score when provided with both tables and graphs, whereas students perform similarly in both conditions. The authors additionally show that proficiency affects not only decision quality but also decision confidence.

The results differ from predictions based solely on the cognitive fit model, as the authors found differences in decision quality to be stronger within the group of managers. The cognitive fit model proposes that decision making performance will improve when the problem representation and the decision making task match. Applying the model to a management context, it is obviously insufficient to explain the differences the authors obtained in the experiment. The authors observed that proficiency plays a role in such performance evaluation tasks.

Based on the results, management accountants should analyse the task that needs to be solved with the reported data. By analysing the type of task, accountants can derive the information processing strategy that will most likely be used by executives for problem solving and determine the suitable visualisation format based on the cognitive fit model. Moderate or complex monitoring tasks will presumably be accessed with perceptual information processing. Data should thus be visualised with graphs.

The authors provide empirical evidence that supplementary graphs in management reports improve decision quality but not decision confidence. The authors furthermore illustrate the limits of the explaining power of the cognitive fit model in a management report context. In an extension of cognitive fit theory, the authors argue that proficiency plays a crucial role in performance evaluation tasks. The authors propose a process for visualisation of management reports based on their findings and previous findings.

The purpose of this is to test the relationship between corporate environmental strategies (CES) and firms’ competitiveness (FC) through collaboration.

Selected companies from Ghana Club 100 were used as the sample for this study. This study used regression to test the hypothesized paths.

The results indicated that a unit change in CES results in a 42.7% alteration in FC – all things being equal. Also, as revealed by the study, supply chain collaboration (SCC) is not a significant predictor of FC. However, SCC plays an indirect role in enhancing the relationship between CES and FC. The results showed that CES act as a significant predictor of a company’s collaboration in its supply chain.

The findings will enlighten firms to outline and implement appropriate environmental strategies to sustain their competitive advantage.

This study is very rare in the African context; hence, it adds to the extant literature by providing a contemporary perspective of CES and FC.

The authors examine how a not-for-profit organisation (NPO) coordinates NPO's actions during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic to remain focussed on strategic and operational goals.

The authors conducted a live case study of an NPO as the crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. Drawing on a sensemaking perspective that incorporates sensegiving, the authors develop a framework of five types of organisational sensemaking. The authors analyse weekly planning meetings during which managers discussed past performance, forecast performance and the forecast duration of current cash reserves.

The authors show how three of the five types of organisational sensemaking helped to coordinate actions. The authors highlight how accounting information triggers organisational sensemaking processes; but depending on the type of organisational sensemaking, accounting information has little further role. The authors also show that the stability of decisions depends on the types of organisational sensemaking.

The authors show how coordination as a management control practice is enabled by organisational sensemaking within an NPO during a crisis. Organisational sensemaking enabled the agreement of actions, which enabled coordination. Accounting practices provided trigger mechanisms to facilitate organisational sensemaking.

Since this study is the first to examine sensemaking processes and accounting practices in coordination in an NPO in a pandemic, the authors contribute to the limited research on NPOs during crises and on the management control practice of coordination. The authors extend the accounting literature on sensemaking by showing that, whilst accounting triggers organisational sensemaking, accounting is only implicated in one type of organisational sensemaking and by revealing the different outcomes of the different types of organisational sensemaking.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how counterfeit users estimate the probability of being detected and how this probability affects their counterfeit consumption behaviour. Specifically, it addresses three questions: do perceived social consequences influence counterfeit users’ probability estimate of being detected? What is the psychological mechanism underlying the estimation of this probability? And how does this probability estimate affect counterfeit purchase and usage intentions?

The authors used three scenario-based experimental studies with university students in Hong Kong, a place where counterfeit products are widely available. First study used a factitious brand of jeans as the stimulus and the other two studies used a Ralph Lauren polo shirt. In each study, the authors measured participants’ responses towards counterfeit purchase and the probability of being detected after they read the relevant brand information and had a close-up view of the attributes in the genuine and counterfeit versions.

The authors found that counterfeit users are susceptible to a pessimism bias such that they estimate a higher probability of being detected when they judge the outcome of being detected as more severe and this bias is driven by the spotlight effect in that counterfeit users judging the outcome as more severe tend to perceive that others pay more attention to their counterfeit usage. Moreover, this pessimism bias is mitigated when the target user is another person instead of oneself, thus suggesting the egocentric nature of the bias.

The authors used undergraduate students and scenario-based experimental approach in all the studies that may limit the generalisability of the findings.

The results suggest that brand managers should emphasise the importance of negative social consequences and highlight the role of outcome severity and egocentric bias in their advertising and communication programmes in order to curb counterfeit consumption.

The research contributes to the growing literature on counterfeit consumption by studying the process underlying estimation of the probability of being detected by others, an important but often neglected factor that influences counterfeit purchase decision. The authors also highlight the role of outcome severity and egocentric bias in this process.

The aim of this paper is to pursue three objectives: to assess the extent to which theoretical concepts and corporate practice are reflecting the contract’s risk management dimensions; to identify ways to make full usage of the contract’s risk dimensions for risk management purposes; to overcome the isolation of the contract caused by its perception as a legal instrument by integrating its handling into the overall corporate management processes.

Literature is analyzed regarding the contract’s roles as a source of risk and as a risk management device. Based on the relevant findings, it uses the Contractual Management Model to develop a concept that integrates all contract-related risk management processes in an enterprise.

The paper redefines the term “contract risk” in the light of modern understanding of contract functions and contract purposes. It shows that only Contractual Risk Management theory takes the management capacity of the contract fully into account. A Contractual Risk Management process is suggested which integrates all contract-related corporate management processes and aligns them to the requirements of transaction risk management and enterprise risk management.

The paper may guide executives to optimize corporate risk management processes through a better understanding of the risk potential of contract and of its risk management capacity. It provides a checklist of redefined contract risks as well as a concept that, for the first time, is aligning all contract-related management processes to support the corporate risk management system.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the development of industrial relations (IR) in Germany since the end of the Second World War and discusses the current challenges posed by economic globalisation und European integration.

Combining a political economy, identifying Germany as a coordinated market economy (social market economy), and actor-centred historical institutionalism approach, outlining the formation and strategies of the main social actors within a particular institutional setting, the paper draws on the broad range of research on IR in Germany and its theoretical debates, including own research in the field.

The legacy of the key institutional settings in the post-war era – primarily the social market economy, co-determination at supervisory boards, works councils and sector-based non-ideological unions with their analogously organised employer counterparts, as well as the dual system of interest representation – has shaped the German IR and still underlie the bargaining processes and joint learning processes although trade unions and employers’ associations have been weakened because of loss of membership. In consequence the coverage scope of collective agreements is now somewhat reduced. Despite being declared dead many times, the “German model” of a “conflictual partnership” of capital and labour has survived many turbulent changes affecting it to the core.

The paper presents an original, theoretical informed reconstruction of the German IR and allows an understanding of the current institutional changes and challenges in the light of historical legacies. Additionally the theoretical debates on path dependence and learning processes of collectivities are enriched through its application to the German case.

This article notes the growing attractiveness of concepts “borrowed” from chaos theory in organizational studies. Many of these interpretations display sentiments broadly congruent with a “postmodern” approach to organization. Indeed chaos theory itself is presented as part of a similar postmodern shift within natural science. However, these sentiments have been subject to stinging criticism by scientists. Here, the deterministic underpinning of chaos theory is used to show that chaos theory is an entirely modernist enterprise. In this case the indeterministic messages taken by organizational theorists are something of a misunderstanding. Consequently, I discuss whether this is enough to threaten the interdisciplinary status of chaos theory, particularly when it is used in a self-consciously ‘metaphorical’ fashion.

This paper seeks to review the current literature in order to explore how performance of leadership in project management determines project outcomes. The specific causes of project success or failure have been an area of much debate in the project management literature. Performance of leadership has been cited as a critical success factor, determining either the success or failure of a project.

An extensive literature review has been undertaken to explore our understanding of how project leadership performance impacts on project outcome.

The mechanisms through which leadership may impact on outcomes are considered. Implications include the need for project managers to prioritize training in leadership skills, and the need for continuous professional improvement to enhance leadership outcomes. No single leadership model is appropriate throughout the duration of the project. Performance, therefore, must be modified to align with the stages of the project duration.

While the literature has given meaningful insights into leadership of projects, there has been little research into performance management of project leadership. The work is the basis of developing a research agenda and establishing a conceptual framework. The opportunity exists, based on this work, for carrying out research on project leadership performance and its effect on project outcomes.

Insightful learning has been achieved into project leadership and the failing of practitioners in appropriate training and development at various stages of the projects life cycle.

Projects and project‐based management, delivered nationally and internationally, are of significant importance to organizations. Increasing understanding of the implications of leadership performance, therefore, is of critical importance.

The literature review has identified significant limitation in project leadership performance management. It is anticipated that this work will trigger further research.