Whereas previous research has largely focused on the top-down establishment of the business partner role, we study bottom-up efforts by individual management accountants to increase their involvement in business partnering and the association of these efforts with their personality. Taking a job crafting perspective, we argue that management accountants may self-initiate changes in their job boundaries toward business partnering. We further argue that management accountants’ job crafting is associated with their plasticity, a disposition for exploration, and the pursuit of new experiences. Drawing on a survey among management accountants employed at a large European bank, we find support for our hypotheses that plasticity has a positive association with job crafting and, through job crafting, with business partnering. Interestingly, this finding particularly holds for management accountants who are not formally required to act as business partners. Our results thus underline that plasticity is a personality trait that can give rise to self-initiated role changes toward business partnering. The results also show that the positive association between job crafting and business partnering is stronger in contexts of tight financial control, which supports our theoretical argument that such contexts provide a greater potential for enhancing the meaningfulness attached to business partnering. Overall, our study highlights that business partnering among management accountants is not inherently linked to their formal job descriptions. Rather, it may emerge as a consequence of self-initiated changes to the job undertaken by individuals possessing appropriate personality traits.

ABSTRACT This study uses a resilience perspective to examine the opportunities and challenges that management accountants may experience when they are given a role as a business partner in risk management. Drawing on insights from an in‐depth case study in a large European bank, our study sheds light on management accountants' responses to a change from a compliance‐oriented role to a business partner role. In the bank studied, part of the management accountants' new role was to balance various performance objectives and thereby to incorporate risk considerations in managerial decision‐making. Our findings suggest that this role challenged the management accountants due to the ambiguity inherent in the role and also due to unfavorable conditions that surrounded the role change. We find that these circumstances culminated in a move backward, with the management accountants falling back on practices that were consistent with the values and beliefs they had developed in their previous role. In doing so, they emphasized what the resilience literature labels “well‐learned responses.” These responses contributed to an emphasis on a narrow risk management approach and had implications for the management accountants' long‐term position within the organization. We discuss these findings against the background of previous research that suggests that management accountants move forward to the business partner role by engaging in job crafting (i.e., adapting their work) or identity work (i.e., redefining their role identity). By utilizing the concepts of lingering identities and identity asymmetries to explain the management accountants' move backward, we also shed light on new facets related to role identity.