What effective general managers really do.

A rather large gap exists between the conventional wisdom on management functions, tools, and systems on the one hand and actual managerial behavior on the other. The former is usually discussed in terms of planning, controlling, staffing, organizing, and directing; the latter is characterized by long hours, fragmented episodes, and oral communication. Actual behavior, as a study of successful general managers shows, looks less systematic, more informal, less reflective, more reactive, less well organized, and more frivolous than a student of strategic planning systems, MIS, or organizational design would ever expect. The gap is important and disturbing for many reasons. First of all, it raises serious questions about the kind of formal planning, performance appraisal, and other systems that are commonly in use today. In a similar way, it raises questions about management education, which usually relies heavily on management "theory" and which is currently producing more than 60,000 new MBAs each year. Furthermore, the gap makes it difficult for executives to coach younger managers and makes it hard for them to know how they might improve their own effectiveness.     

Casemix accounting systems: new spaces for action

This paper discusses the implementation of a casemix accounting system within a large New Zealand public hospital. In the context of healthcare, casemix accounting systems are involved in attempts to increase the cost-consciousness of clinicians through the rationalization and codification of clinical activity. The paper considers the power effects of casemix accounting using a perspective that views such information and control systems as disciplinary technologies. The complex and contradictory setting of the hospital characterized by a negotiated order meant that while the casemix accounting system did appear to provide some controlling influence, it also produced forms of resistance on the part of clinicians. Our experience suggests that such systems are best thought of as making possible a new discursive space within which all organizational participants, in this case both management and clinicians, can act.     

Institutional Investors’ Reaction to SEC Concerns about IFRS and US GAAP Reporting

For the period of 2006 to 2008, we collect Comment Letters issued by the SEC that question the application of US GAAP by US firms or the application of IFRS by European firms registered with the SEC. We investigate whether institutional investors react to the letters by changing their holdings and whether their responses vary for US registrants and European registrants. We do this via a treatment‐effects model in which we test the hypothesis that institutional investors rebalance their portfolio holdings because they view Comment Letters as informative public signals. We find that institutional investors reduce their equity holdings when firms receive SEC Comment Letters, and their negative reactions are most marked for low turnover institutional investors, who we use to represent those informed investors most prepared to incur costs to closely monitor firms. Next, while noting that the number of Letters questioning application of IFRS are smaller in number relative to those questioning application of US GAAP, we investigate whether there are different reactions to Comment Letters questioning different standards. We show that there is a higher probability of the SEC questioning the application of IFRS as compared to US GAAP. After controlling for firm‐specific conditions that impact the issuance of a Comment Letter, we show that this higher probability has economic significance because institutional investors’ react more negatively to Comment Letters that question the application of IFRS as compared to US GAAP. A content analysis confirms the economic importance of the Comment Letters. We find that in almost half of all IFRS cases the Comment Letters request amendments to financial statements.     

Management accounting systems, perceived environmental uncertainty and organization structure: An empirical investigation

The research reported in this study concerns the relationships among an organization's environment, structure and information system. Based on an empirical study it appears that information systems and organizational structures are both a function of the environment. However, after controlling for the effects of the environment, it does not appear that an organization's iinformation system and structure are significantly related to each other.     

Influencia de los sistemas de información en los resultados organizacionales

Over the last years, information systems (IS) have constituted the main focus of research in the business organization literature. This has created the need to identify their entrepreneurial value. The paper presents a theory-based model that was developed to assess the degree of IS success in SMEs. The aim of the proposed model is to determine the influence of IS on organizational performance. To achieve this aim, the Partial Least Square statistical technique is used to analyze data from 133 questionnaires administered to businesses across the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. The results show that those enterprises that are more concerned with the improvement of the systems’ quality, information quality and the informatics service enhance the organizational outcomes. The present study contributes to the body of literature on the assessment of IS success in the context of an emerging country. In particular, the study provides a thorough assessment of the IS effectiveness and their impact on organizational performance.     

To Tip or Not to Tip,That Is the Question: Rewarding Customer Service Encounters

This instructional case deals with compensation schemes in service industries, specifically with managerial intervention in tipping schemes in a restaurant. The case provides an opportunity to explore the interaction of direct client feedback and management control systems in controlling service encounters and to develop an understanding of management control systems in a team production environment. While the case focuses on compensation issues and requires some quantitative analysis, it also provides an opportunity to introduce the concept of “management controls as a package” and an assessment of the linkage between organizational strategy and the overall package of management controls. Case guidance is provided for alternative approaches to using the case.     

Using Organizational Architecture to Lead Change*

Effective leadership involves more than developing and communicating the right strategic vision for the company. To encourage employees to carry out the corporate vision, companies must ensure consistency among the following three main components of their “organizational architecture:”

• ? the allocation of decision‐making authority (that is, who in the organization gets to make what decisions);
• ? performance measurement systems (for evaluating the performance of individuals as well as business units); and
• ? reward systems (the rewards for success, both financial and otherwise, and the consequences of failure).

The authors illustrate the application of this framework with the case of Xerox's (eventually) successful attempt to create a customer‐oriented workforce in the 1980s. But a more effective demonstration of the importance of these principles, as the authors go on to suggest, might well be the same company's well‐known failure to realize the commercial promise of the many inventions by its research group in Palo Alto. This organizational framework is especially useful for evaluating the likely effects of major corporate initiatives such as “Six Sigma” or the “Balanced Scorecard.” For example, it could be used to help top management determine whether, and under what circumstances, decentralization is likely to improve decision‐making and performance, as well as the changes in the firm's performance management and incentive systems that would be required to make decentralization work. Finally, the authors apply the framework to another important leadership issue: corporate ethics. In response to the scandals of the past decade and the passage of Sarbanes‐Oxley, many U.S. companies have issued formal codes of conduct, appointed ethics officers, and instituted training programs in ethics. But a key question for top management is whether the incentives established by the firm's organizational architecture reinforce or undermine the code of conduct. In this sense, ensuring consistency in organizational design is an important leadership function—one that is critical to encouraging ethical behavior as well as the pursuit of shareholder value.     

Employee Selection as a Control System

Theories from the economics, management control, and organizational behavior literatures predict that when it is difficult to align incentives by contracting on output, aligning preferences via employee selection may provide a useful alternative. This study investigates this idea empirically using personnel and lending data from a financial services organization that implemented a highly decentralized business model. I exploit variation in this organization in whether or not employees are selected via channels that are likely to sort on the alignment of their preferences with organizational objectives. I find that employees selected through such channels are more likely to use decision‐making authority in the granting and structuring of consumer loans than those who are not. Conditional on using decision‐making authority, their decisions are also less risky ex post. These findings demonstrate employee selection as an important, but understudied, element of organizational control systems.     

Cooperative Knowledge Processing: The Key Technology for Future Organizations

Drawing from the challenges organizations are faced with today, there is a growing understanding that future market success and long-term survival of enterprises will increasingly be related to the effectiveness of information technology utilization. This, however, requires us to intertwine much more seriously organizational theory and research in information processing than previously. In this paper we approached this aim from the perspective of radically decentralized, computerized enterprises. We further assume that organizations are increasingly process-oriented, rather than applying to structuring organizations based on task decomposition and assignment. This scenario reveals that, due to the inherent autonomy of organizational units, the coordination of decentralized organizational activities (workflows, processes) necessitates a cooperative style of problem solving. On this basis, the paper introduces the research area of cooperative knowledge processing, with a particular focus on multi-agent decision support systems and human-computer cooperative work. Finally, several important organizational applications of cooperative knowledge processing are presented that demonstrate how future enterprises can take great advantage from these new technologies.     

Configuring management control systems: Theorizing the integration of strategy and sustainability

Although organizations have embraced the sustainability rhetoric in their discourse and external reporting, little is known about the processes whereby management control systems contribute to a deeper integration of sustainability within organizational strategy. This paper addresses this gap and mobilizes a configuration approach to theorize the roles and uses of management control systems (MCSs) and sustainability control systems (SCSs) in the integration of sustainability within organizational strategy. Building on Simons’ levers of control framework, we distinguish two possible uses of a MCS and a SCS—a diagnostic use and an interactive use—and we specify the modes of MCSs and SCSs integration. We rely on these two core dimensions to identify eight organizational configurations that reflect the various uses as well as their modes of integration of SCS and MCS. We characterize these ideal-type configurations, explain their impact on the triple bottom line, and describe which mechanisms allow organizations to move from one configuration to another. In so doing, we highlight various paths toward sustainability integration or marginalization within organizations. Finally, we explain how our framework can support future research on the role of MCS and SCSs in the integration of sustainability within strategy.     

IT internal control weaknesses and firm performance: An organizational liability lens

The information systems literature and the public press have called for organizations to more closely scrutinize their information technology (IT) controls; however, little more than anecdotal evidence exists on the business value of quality IT internal control, beyond regulatory compliance. In this paper, we (a) advance an organizational liability perspective to the question of IT internal control value; and (b) use the unique setting provided by the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) to investigate the relationship between IT internal control weaknesses (ICWs) and both accounting earnings (a contemporaneous measure of firm performance) and market value (a forward looking, risk-adjusted measure of firm performance). Using a data set that provides audited annual assessments of the effectiveness of both IT and non-IT internal controls for a cross-section of companies as mandated by SOX, we find that firms that report an IT ICW have lower accounting earnings compared to firms with strong IT internal controls. We also find that IT ICW moderates the association between accounting earnings and market valuation, with firms reporting weak IT internal controls having a lower earnings multiple. These results are sustained even after controlling for non-IT ICWs and firm-specific factors that are known determinants of ICWs, and are reinforced using an inter-temporal changes analysis in which we use each firm as its own control at a different point in time. Overall, our results provide empirical evidence which suggests that IT internal controls are a strategic necessity and that information systems risk is priced by the capital markets. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.     

Influence of information systems on organizational results

In recent years, information systems (IS) comprise one of the main fields of study in business organization, caused by the need to identify their business value. Therefore, in this research and based on a theoretical review, a model is developed for the evaluation of the success of the IS for small and medium enterprises (SME) to determine the influence of the IS in the organizational results. To reach this goal, the Partial Least Squares (PLS) statistical technique was used through a survey made to 133 companies of Tamaulipas state, Mexico. The results obtained allow deducing that the companies that pay more attention on improving the quality of the system, of the information, and of the information systems, favor their organizational results. This work contributes to the literature on the measurement of the success of the IS in the context of a country with an emerging economy, particularly by allowing to identify in a broader manner the measurement of its effectiveness and its incidence in the business performance.     

The differential effect of environmental dimensionality,size, and structure on budget system characteristics in hotels

Whilst the service sector is a major component of world economies, research into, and thus our understanding of, how management control systems function in the service environment is limited. To advance our knowledge and understanding of the role of budgets in service organizations, this organizational level study extends prior manufacturing context research investigating the influence of contextual variables on budget system characteristics (BSC) to hotels. Since the nature of service firm operations is highly dependent on the external environment, perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU) is likely to be a key contextual variable. Consistent with the organizational theory literature, this study conceptualizes PEU more correctly as a multi-dimensional construct and seeks to ascertain the influence of components of PEU on the BSC of hotels, the chosen service industry. Based on a sample of 106 hotels and using path analyses, the results indicated that: (1) different dimensions of PEU have differential effects on BSC and organizational structure, (2) hotel size has a significant effect on BSC, (3) hotel size does not significantly influence structure, and (4) hotel organizational structure has significant influences on BSC. The finding for PEU raises implications for future researchers studying PEU.     

Using Organizational Architecture to Lead Change

Effective leadership involves more than developing and communicating the right strategic vision for the company. To encourage employees to carry out the corporate vision, companies must ensure consistency among the following three main components of their organizational architecture: (1) the allocation of decision‐making authority; (2) performance measurement systems; and (3) reward systems. The authors illustrate the application of this framework with the case of Xerox's (eventually) successful attempt to create a customer‐oriented workforce in the 1980s. But a more effective demonstration of the importance of these principles, as the authors go on to suggest, might well be the same company's well‐known failure to harvest the commercial promise of the many inventions by its research group in Palo Alto, one of which became the basis for Steve Jobs' success at Apple. This organizational framework is especially useful for evaluating the likely effects of major corporate initiatives such as “Six Sigma” or the “Balanced Scorecard.” For example, it could be used to help top management determine whether, and under what circumstances, decentralization is likely to improve decision‐making and performance, as well as the changes in the firm's performance management and incentive systems that would be required to make decentralization work. Finally, the authors apply the framework to another important leadership issue: corporate ethics. Since the scandals of the early 2000s and the passage of Sarbanes‐Oxley, many, if not most, U.S. companies have issued formal codes of conduct, appointed ethics officers, and instituted training programs in ethics. But a key question for top management is whether the incentives established by the company's organizational architecture reinforce or undermine the code of conduct. Ensuring consistency in organizational design is an important leadership function—one that is critical to encouraging ethical behavior as well as the pursuit of shareholder value.     

Organizational change in an Australian university: Responses to a research assessment exercise

The objective of this paper is to explore the way internal organizational control processes are changed in response to external demands. It does this by investigating the organizational change undertaken by an Australian university in anticipation of, and in response to, an externally imposed research assessment exercise (RAE), specifically focusing on the university's internal research-related performance management system (PMS) and its impact on academics. It adopts a case study method, using data from publicly available documents, interviews with senior management, and a survey administered to academics. The data is interpreted and analyzed using Broadbent and Laughlin's organizational change model. The findings reveal that RAE was anticipated with the appointment of new senior leadership, a new vision, restructure of faculties and departments, and changes to the research PMS. The changes to both the university's mission (significant and longlasting, second order change) and its internal systems (less significant, first order change) are evident. In the context of the global proliferation of PMSs in the higher education sector, this paper contributes to the literature on PMSs, indicating its relevance to universities. Its empirics provide useful insights for university managers and regulators and, more broadly, the paper contributes to our understanding of organizational change.     

现代税收文化内涵及其建设的再探讨

税收文化不仅指税收机构自身的组织文化,而且更重要的是包含社会范畴里的税收观念、纳税意识等意识形态及保证税收工作正常有序周转的税收制度。税收文化建设必须从系统工程出发,立足国情,统筹全局,协调税收文化系统各组成部分的发展,从而保障税收制度的有效运行,促成依法治税,最终成为推进经济社会发展和现代化进程的一种"文化力"。     

ATTRIBUTES AND TECHNIQUES OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE ACCOUNTING EDUCATORS: A MULTINATIONAL STUDY

Recently, many organizations and the general public have called for increased attention to, and improvements in, the effectiveness and quality of higher education. To this end, a multinational field study of the teaching techniques and attributes of master accounting educators was conducted, the findings of which are reported in this paper. Results of the study reveal that master accounting teachers in several nations employ interactive learning techniques extensively, exhibit genuine interest in and concern for students, and possess strong communication and organizational skills. Additional insight is provided into specific attributes of highly effective accounting educators, their lecturing and questioning techniques, techniques of enhancing student interest and participation, and syllabus and examination construction.     

On the convergence of management accounting and financial accounting – the role of information technology in accounting change

In this article we theorize and conceptualize the recent convergence of management accounting (MA) and financial accounting (FA) with the advancements in information technology (IT), and explicate not only how this convergence is manifested in the technical and technological domain, but also how it is reflected in their convergence at the behavioral and organizational level.Drawing on the analytical model by Hemmer and Labro (2008), in which the forward-looking perspective of FA leads to forward-looking MA, we build a conceptual framing to analyze this convergence. According to this framing, information technology (IT) serves as a facilitator, catalyst, motivator, or even an enabler for the convergence of MA and FA. We further argue that convergence is a much broader phenomenon than claimed by Hemmer and Labro. It firstly covers the technical and technological domain, including the intentional integration of information systems and software, as well as the intentional combination of methods or standards, extending thereafter to the behavioral and organizational domain with the (un)intentional alignment regarding both functions and processes as well as the (un)intentional convergence regarding both work and roles. The applicability of this conceptual framing is illustrated with a set of examples.We present illustrations of the manifestations and outcomes of convergence in both the technical and technological domain (related to accounting standards, discretionary reporting, performance measurement, transfer pricing, competitor, customer and contractor analysis, due diligence in M&As), and the behavioral and organizational manifestation domain (related to accounting processes, work and the role of accountants, incentive systems, accounting and control in multinational companies, the control of business networks, the board of directors and venture capitalists). Based on our observations, we conclude that the forward-looking FA elements are often intertwined with MA, and vice versa, and that convergence in the technical and technological domain appears to precede convergence in the behavioral and organizational domain. In most of our observations, IT plays an important or even crucial role in this convergence process. In the light of these convergence observations, we open several avenues for further research.     

Organizational Health Maintenance: The Design of a Knowledge-Based Strategy Support System

Rather than reacting to strategic problems, a healthy organization should focus on preventing debilitating strategic decisions. This research takes the view that the implementation and monitoring of strategic plans should be more open to opportunistic and preventive intervention as made possible by the design and implementation of innovative information systems technologies employing recent knowledge-based systems advancements. A knowledge-based alerting approach to organizational health maintenance (OHM) is developed. Critical to this approach is the determination of a set of triggers for determining when actions are deemed necessary for preventing strategic problems. An OHM System architecture and implementation are described.