Due to the frequent occurrence of ethical transgressions and unethical employee behaviors, there has lately been an increasing interest in the ethical foundations of contemporary organizations. However, large-scale comprehensive analyses of organizational ethics are still comparatively limited. Our study contributes to both management control and business ethics literature by empirically examining potential antecedents as well as resulting effects of ethical work climates on organizationallevel outcomes. Based on a cross-sectional survey among 295 large-and medium-sized companies, we find that more informal means of control constitute important elements of a broader organizational control context that are strongly related to the emergence of coherent ethical work climates with an increased awareness of ethical issues. Moreover, our results show that the relationship between ethical work climates and organizational performance can be considered as rather indirect as it is fully mediated by increased mutual trust among employees. Overall, our study thus supports the particular importance of ethical work climates and identifies appropriate means to encourage ethical conduct.
To provide accounting information for management control purposes, two fundamental options exist: (a) The financial records can be used as a database for management accounting (integrated accounting system design), or (b) the management accounting system used by controllers can be based upon a so-called third set of books besides the financial and tax accounting records. Whereas the latter approach had been typical for firms in German-speaking countries until the 1980s, since then an increasing number of them has been changing towards a (partially) integrated accounting system design.In accounting literature, a debate is still on whether this change is for the better or for the worse, especially as from a normative theory perspective no dominant standard exists that provides appropriate information for any given accounting problem which would support a separate accounting system design. Our paper adds to this debate by empirically analyzing the impact of an increasingly integrated accounting system design on controllership effectiveness. Our analysis is distinctive for two reasons. First, we use a dyadic research design surveying both controllers and representatives of general management which allows us to include management's perspective into our analysis in a valid fashion. Second, we do not restrict our model to the technical or supply-side characteristics of management accounting system design, but expand our approach to the user perspective of management accounting information as a financial language.By using structural equation modeling for a sample of 149 dyads surveyed from the German Top-1500 firms in 2007, we identify no statistically significant direct effect of the technical accounting system design, but a fully mediating influence of a unified financial language on controllership effectiveness. Our results imply amongst others that consistency of management accounting with financial reporting, which results from an integrated accounting system design, is an important property of management accounting information. Especially in the context of a financially oriented management control system, controllers therefore should take special care to align their internal reporting with the financial accounting reports provided to investors.-3 -
Since 1993 an increasing number of listed German companies have been publishing their consolidated financial statements in accordance with either IFRS or US GAAP. In 1998 this was approved as a substitute for the consolidated German GAAP financial statements of listed companies ( §292a HGB). Our study surveys the motives that led these companies to opt for international reporting systems (IFRS or US GAAP) rather than German GAAP and considers whether these objectives have been achieved. Rather surprisingly, we find that even though companies state that their overall expectations have been met to a satisfactory degree, a detailed analysis shows that several of the ex-ante objectives have not been achieved from an ex-post point of view. Additionally, we use logistic regression analysis to show that companies choosing IFRS rather than US GAAP and vice versa differ distinctly in the objectives they pursue with their choice of international GAAP.
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