Knowledge that Transforms

Motivated by the importance of effective oversight in mitigating the risks of employee external whistleblowing, this study investigates the effect of audit committee financial expertise and equity compensation on employee external whistleblowing. Drawing on theories of motivated reasoning and overconfidence, I propose that while audit committee financial expertise could enhance oversight, higher equity compensation can trigger cognitive biases that lead audit committee members to overestimate their monitoring effectiveness and discount or overlook the risks in internal reports of wrongdoing, increasing employee external whistleblowing. Using a sample of U.S. listed firms involved in misconduct, I find that greater audit committee financial expertise is associated with lower levels of employee external whistleblowing when audit committee equity compensation is low, but with higher levels of employee external whistleblowing when equity compensation is high. These findings suggest that audit committee equity compensation may undermine the benefits of financial expertise, offering new insights into the unintended consequences of governance and compensation practices.

While prior work in management accounting has mainly focused on results controls, this study investigates how action accountability as an action control and job autonomy are jointly used by supervisors in a setting in which results controls at the individual employee level are of little relevance. We analyze our research question by collecting survey data among nurses from Swiss public hospitals. We predict and find that when task complexity is high, job autonomy and action accountability are used as substitutes by the supervisor. When task complexity is low, job autonomy and action accountability have a less substitutive relation than when task complexity is high. In supplemental analyses, we also find that action accountability and job autonomy act as substitutes with respect to employee loyalty and effort when task complexity is high and less so when it is low, consistent with supervisors’ control choices. We also collect additional archival and experimental data to provide supplemental evidence for our underlying theory. Our study enhances the understanding of the use and effects of action controls in settings in which results controls at the individual employee level are of little relevance.

This paper is concerned with the understanding of resistance in accounting research. Using the case of a Southern Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and its relationships with donors within the international development assemblage, I discuss how the organization, in experiencing mixed feelings towards its donors' managerial discourses and accounting practices, engages in a process of resistance. Such resistance operates amidst a processual interplay of attraction and repulsion towards the colonial opposite. Using Homi Bhabha's Postcolonial Theory (PCT) and its emphasis on the affective dimension in colonial encounters, I find that the NGO's actions are nestled within hybridity and ambivalence, which drive the NGO towards balancing opposing forces to move forward in the assemblage. I contribute to accounting literature by offering an affective understanding of the ambivalence produced by postcolonial relations mediated by accounting, and by reconceptualizing resistance in accounting research as a flux of affects with political implications in shifting relationships.