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The purpose of this study is to investigate the moderating role of honesty-humility of financial managers on aggressive financial reporting behavior.

To test the research hypotheses, a scenario-based questionnaire taken from Brink et al. (2018) was used. Using a cross-sectional survey design, the authors collected primary data of 160 financial managers of firms in Iran using structured questionnaires. The research sample selected was based on Cohen et al.’s (2000) table. To test the research hypotheses, analysis of variance was used.

The results showed that increasing honesty-humility of financial managers decreases the impact of social pressure and risk appetite interaction on aggressive financial reporting. In addition, the results of further analysis showed that reducing the honesty-humility of financial managers increases the impact of risk appetite on aggressive financial reporting. Moreover, the results indicate that reducing the honesty-humility of financial managers increases the impact of social pressure on aggressive financial reporting.

This finding provides significant evidence for auditor, managers and policymakers in Iran. Policymakers, auditor and company managers can emphasize compliance with the code of ethics, internal control and corporate governance to increase ethics and reduce negative economic consequences.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first case in an emerging economy to survey the moderating role of honesty-humility of financial managers on aggressive financial reporting behavior. Also, this study contributes to understanding how factors at the individual, social and organizational level combine to influence financial managers’ aggressive financial reporting behavior.

This paper aims to critically examine the accounting and information systems literature to understand the changes that are occurring in the management accounting profession. The changes the authors are interested in are linked to technology-driven innovations in managerial decision-making and in organizational structures. In addition, the paper highlights research gaps and opportunities for future research.

The authors adopted a grounded theory literature review method (Wolfswinkel et al., 2013) to achieve the study’s aims.

The authors identified four research themes that describe the changes in the management accounting profession due to technology-driven innovations: structured vs unstructured data, human vs algorithm-driven decision-making, delineated vs blurred functional boundaries and hierarchical vs platform-based organizations. The authors also identified tensions mentioned in the literature for each research theme.

Previous studies display a rather narrow focus on the role of digital technologies in accounting work and new competences that management accountants require in the digital era. By contrast, the authors focus on the broader technology-driven shifts in organizational processes and structures, which vastly change how accounting information is collected, processed and analyzed internally to support managerial decision-making. Hence, the paper focuses on how management accountants can adapt and evolve as their organizations transition toward a digital environment.

This study aims to investigate the consequences of middle managers’ sensegiving for organisational change in neglected workplaces, where middle managers are given insufficient resources because of receiving low attention from top management.

The authors conducted a case study of three call centres in the Japanese non-life insurance industry. To collect data, the authors conducted interviews with ten stakeholders and made multiple field observations.

The authors identified the following mechanism: in neglected workplaces, middle managers initially focus on sensegiving to employees because they recognise the difficulty of eliciting support from top management. However, as a result, they see sensegiving to employees as top priority and do not try to elicit the support of top management, which is necessary for further organisational change. As a result, organisational change stops at a certain level.

The authors identified the following mechanism: in neglected workplaces, middle managers initially focus on sensegiving to employees because they recognise the difficulty of eliciting support from top management. However, as a result, they see sensegiving to employees as their top priority and do not try to elicit the support of top management, which is necessary for further organisational change. As a result, organisational change stops at a certain level.

First, this study contributes to the body of research on the effects of sensegiving on organisational change. It shows the new problems hidden behind organisational change, which existing research merely regards as independent successes. Second, this study identifies middle managers’ behaviour during organisational change in neglected workplaces. Instead of focusing on the factors necessary for successful organisational change, as in existing studies, this study extends the knowledge of the role of middle managers in organisational change by focusing on their behaviours when success factors are not aligned.

This study focuses on ratcheting and budget behavior in nonprofit museums. Specifically, the authors examine how performance compared with the budget affects future revenue budgets, and how this differs from the extant literature focused on for-profit organizations. The study focuses specifically on the relationship between museums and their sources of public funding and how this affects how museums prepare budgets.

Based on four years of data covering 97 state-subsidized Danish museums, the authors analyze budget ratcheting using least absolute deviation (LAD) estimations in the form of median regressions.

The authors find that when actual revenue from admission charges is below the budget, the decrease in the following year's budget is greater than the increase in the following year's budget when actual revenue from admission charges is above the budget (i.e. the authors find asymmetrical ratcheting).

The findings are based on a specific setting (Danish museums), and the results may not be generalizable to other settings.

This study provides insights into the museum sector and other sectors with similar characteristics and contributes to understanding the differences between museums and for-profit organizations when it comes to budgeting. As private-sector management practices are gaining ground in the museum sector, it is important to learn more about budgeting-related issues in this sector.

The asymmetrical ratcheting the authors find is the opposite of ratcheting typically found in for-profit organizations. The authors attribute the results to the incentive conflict between museums and their public funding sources. The authors point to the museums' dependence on public funding as an explanation for the results and, thereby, extend the knowledge on ratcheting to organizations with different characteristics than traditional, for-profit organizations.

The study aims to investigate the impact of indirectly evoked incentives, in the form of supervisor’s preferences, on the decision about accounting policy regarding depreciation method selection and to examine subsequent post-decision distortion by evaluating the depreciation method.

The authors conducted two experiments with control and treatment groups, manipulating the supervisor’s indirectly evoked preferences. In Study 2, the authors also measured the evaluation of both depreciation methods to investigate post-decisional distortion regarding the assessment of the depreciation method chosen in a decision task. Study 1 was conducted among 85 accounting students, while Study 2 consisted of 200 accountants.

Both studies revealed the significant impact of supervisor’s indirectly evoked preferences on accounting policy decisions. Participants who were aware of supervisors’ preferences were more likely to choose the depreciation method that was consistent with those preferences. The authors also found that those participants attached a higher value to the depreciation method, providing evidence that adherence to the supervisor’s preferences results in a distorted assessment of the depreciation methods.

First, this study shows that indirectly evoked supervisors’ preferences may lead to a departure from substantive criteria resulting in low-quality accounting outcomes. Second, the assessment of the depreciation method is inseparable from the situational context, as the evaluation of the depreciation method is interdependent upon the preferences of the choice of a depreciation method and the fulfillment of those preferences.

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) has attracted considerable attention worldwide, and the challenges of managing employees’ entrepreneurial behaviours are increasingly recognised. However, the paucity of research on managers’ entrepreneurial behaviour in the United Arab Emirates multinational corporate environment creates a salient gap in the current understanding of how national and organisational cultures that not always align frame the critical problems of CE. This study aims to fill this research gap by examining multinationals’ CE antecedents drawing on an institutional perspective in Dubai.

The author conducts 54 in-depth interviews with middle managers in multinational enterprises. This study adopts a multiple case study research design to reveal whether an emergent discovery is exclusive to a particular case or is consistently replicated by multiple cases. The author has used abductive reasoning to systematically integrate analytical framework deduction with raw data induction.

This study’s findings indicate that CE in Dubai is ineffective and fragmented. Arguably, the cultural background of employees creates different circumstances and determinants of entrepreneurial behaviour. Hence, CE may not achieve epitome competencies without identifying multicultural nuances in an organisational context.

Existing research has placed relatively little emphasis on the role of individual national culture in multinational enterprises. This study’s results offer potentially valuable implications for theory, practice and future research addressing other emerging countries. This model presents a distinct CE architecture with compelling evidence for national culture (at the macro level), organisational culture, Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument and emergent factors (at the meso level) and individual middle managers' real-life experience (at the micro level).

This study aims to investigate the impact of the development of high-speed rail (HSR) network on earnings management, especially on the trade-off between the usage of accruals-based earnings management (AM) and real earnings management (RM) techniques, and consequently, examines the extent to which the HSR network–earnings management nexus is moderated by governance and religion factors.

Using a sample of Chinese A-listed firms over an 11-year period, this study uses regression techniques as the baseline methodology while controlling for industry and year-fixed effects. The authors also use endogeneity tests (including instrumental variable method, Generalized Methods of Moments estimation and difference-in-difference) and different robustness checks.

The key findings are threefold. First, the HSR network development reduces AM. This suggests that the presence of HSR network is effective in reducing information asymmetry. Second, the use of RM technique increases with the HSR network development. This indicates that managers do not seem to engage in less earnings management with the HSR network development but instead appear to switch from the easy-to-detect AM to the more costly RM approach. Finally, the HSR network and earnings management nexus is moderated by governance and religion factors.

This study provides new evidence on the trade-off between AM and RM by managers and pioneers in examining the impacts of governance and religion factors on the relationship between the HSR network and the trade-off of earnings management techniques.

This study examines how three psychological factors (i.e. perceived experience quality, perceived similarity and client participation) that impact client evaluations of their recent audit experiences influence client satisfaction and trustworthiness, which, in turn, affect advocacy in an small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) context. Furthermore, the study investigates whether the influence of the three psychological factors on client satisfaction and trustworthiness is contingent on client expertise.

The sample consisted of 744 SME executives from the following four regions: central, northern, eastern and southern Thailand. Data were collected using a survey questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to ensure the reliability and validity of the scale before structural equation modeling was applied to analyze the data.

The results showed significant positive effects of the three psychological factors (perceived experience quality, perceived similarity and client participation) on client satisfaction and perceived trustworthiness. The moderating role of client expertise on the relationships is also found. More specifically, client expertise positively moderated the connections between experience quality and satisfaction, experience quality and trustworthiness and client participation and trustworthiness. Conversely, client expertise negatively moderated the similarity–satisfaction and similarity–trustworthiness relationships.

This study contributes to the audit literature by examining the role of psychological factor that impacts client satisfaction and perceived trustworthiness in the SME context. Moreover, the moderating role of client expertise is examined for the first time, providing new insights into the boundary condition of the relationship.

This paper aims to investigate the law and logic mechanism of management control matching pattern and company strategy aggressiveness under different strategies by textual analysis, based on the empirical data of Chinese A-share listed companies during the period from 2010 to 2018. Additional analyses further investigate the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty and R&D intensity on the relationship between management control matching type and strategy aggressiveness. The conclusion can help relevant departments to develop management control theory and method system with Chinese characteristics and provide theoretical reference for the matching mode of dual control.

This paper uses the text analysis method. The main explanatory variables are analyzed using the computer SQL Server database software through the relevant text of the board of directors report in the company annual report. Other financial data came from the CSMAR database, excluding ST and PT and companies with missing data, and 16,902 samples were finally obtained. This paper conducted statistical analysis through Stata12.

This paper shows that the matching pattern between formal and informal control is divided into three types. They have different impacts on strategy aggressiveness. Specifically, consistent matching type II significantly positively influences the aggressiveness of offensive strategy. Consistent matching type I significantly positively influences the aggressiveness of defensive strategy. Complementary matching type I significantly positively influences the aggressiveness of analytical strategy. Additional analyses find that compared with non-high-tech companies, high-tech companies have more significant influence on the relationship between management control matching pattern and company strategic aggressiveness. And compared with other two “strategy-control” matching patterns, both environmental uncertainty and product innovation have more significant influence on the relationship between consistent matching II and offensive strategy aggressiveness.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper divides the formal and informal control matching patterns of management control into three categories for the first time. It examines the relationship between the formal and informal control matching of management accounting and the degree of strategy aggressiveness. The conclusion provides new empirical evidence to promote the effective implementation of development strategies for companies. It can help relevant departments to develop management control theory and method systems with Chinese characteristics and provide theoretical references for the matching mode of dual control.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are critical in the sustainability agenda, not only as catalysts for promoting sustainability practices but also because their activities have substantial social, economic and environmental impacts. Yet there is limited research that examines their sustainability performance. This paper aims to investigate the factors that are associated with sustainability performance in HEIs. Specifically, drawing from the stakeholder theory and exploiting Ullmann’s (1985) conceptual framework, this study examines the association between sustainability performance and stakeholder power, strategic posture and financial slack resources.

The authors draw the sample from the People & Planet University Green League Table for the period 2011–2019 and use the generalised estimating equations for the modelling approach.

This study finds that stakeholder power, in particular, funding grant income, tuition fee income and student and staff numbers, are positively associated with sustainability performance. In relation to strategic posture, this study finds that sustainability performance is negatively associated with governing body independence and gender diversity, and positively associated with internal structures. Finally, regarding financial slack resources, this study finds that surplus income (staff costs) is positively (negatively) associated with sustainability performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research contributes to several existing literature focusing on the not-for-profit sector by documenting, for the first time, the role of stakeholder power, strategic posture and slack financial resources on sustainability performance.

The paper includes relevant implications for HEI managers and regulators for promoting sustainability.

These results contribute to the literature on the factors influencing sustainability performance.