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.

In this study, we examine how personality attributes and a coordinated compensation design jointly contribute to complementarity in the CEO–CFO dyad. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, we propose that the combination of a CEO with a promotion focus and a CFO with a prevention focus benefits firms. In such a dyad, promotion-focused CEOs bring creativity, speed, and eagerness to advancement, whereas prevention-focused CFOs attend to vigilance, helping to keep promotion-focused CEOs grounded. We further argue that the effectiveness of this CEO–CFO dyad depends on promotion-focused CEOs being open to critical advice from prevention-focused CFOs. To make CEOs more amenable to CFOs' advice, we suggest similar compensation plans that foreground common objectives. We empirically test our arguments by focusing on the CEO–CFO dyad's influence on investment spending and firm performance in a longitudinal sample covering more than 10,000 firm years. Our results indicate a positive association between CEO promotion focus and investment spending, as well as firm performance. We further find that CFO prevention focus weakens the association between CEO promotion focus and investment spending, but strengthens the association with firm performance. These moderating influences of CFO prevention focus are more pronounced for higher compensation similarity in the CEO–CFO dyad. In sum, our findings exemplify that deliberately considering CEO and CFO personality attributes and their compensation design jointly strengthens the functioning of the CEO–CFO dyad.

In this article, we draw on the writings of Nigerian-born sociologist Peter P. Ekeh and, using extensive and hard-to-reach fieldwork data, we seek to understand how members of the Civic Public—the political and business elite—managed to obscure and obfuscate their corruption via accounting tools and strategies at the expense of the communities they serve, i.e., the Primordial Public. We find that members of the Civic Public engaged in a series of accounting schemes—some simple, others complex—to divert vast sums of much-needed funds away from the intended beneficiaries of a major charitable initiative established to provide aid for the un(der)-employed youth of Ghana. We make important contributions to the study of accounting, corruption, and morality. First, we disaggregate amorality from morality, situating these terms both theoretically and contextually, before discussing how members of the primordial public are systemically and culturally socialized to the elite's amorality. We build on and extend Ekeh's arguments in two ways. First, we discuss the emergence of a third public, which we call the “In-between”. Second, we argue that members of this third public are increasingly at risk of being dragged into morally dubious actions by and on behalf of their elite peers as they are persuaded toward morally dubious actions and behaviours.

This study investigates, via two experiments, the effects of target transparency, which reflects employees' knowledge about each other's targets in an organization, on managers' target setting decisions. We also investigate whether this effect depends on the need for help among employees. We predict and find that target transparency and need for help interact to influence managers' target setting decisions. Target transparency increases target levels when the need for help is low, but not when it is high. Further, target transparency leads managers to differentiate less between individual employee targets. This reduction is greater when the need for help is high than when it is low. Additional analyses support our theory by revealing that managers strategically set targets in a way that is consistent with an intention to motivate both effort at the individual level and help among employees when such are needed. Our results help explain anecdotal evidence of why companies that value help among employees often make targets transparent throughout the entire organization.

Prior accounting and economics research suggests that tournaments with highly concentrated prizes attract the most talented individuals. However, this research assumes that tournament entrants have granular, reliable information about their relative skill level. Using a laboratory experiment, we replicate this result: when relative skill information is available, prize concentration leads to skill-based selection. However, when relative skill information is unavailable, and tournament choice is public, we find that highly concentrated prizes instead attract more narcissistic individuals. Together, our results suggest that high-level positions with exceptionally large prizes can attract narcissistic applicants when entry decisions are publicly observable and relative skill information is limited. These findings inform both theory and practice by clarifying when tournament prize concentration selects for skill versus personality.