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Although management accounting innovations such as Activity-Based Costing, the Balanced Scorecard and benchmarking have received much academic interest in recent years, our understanding of why some organizations adopt and implement such new management accounting systems (MAS) and others do not, is still underdeveloped. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the role of the CFO in MAS innovation. We hypothesize that individual differences between CFOs are predictive of organizations' use of innovative MAS. In addition, we propose that CFO characteristics moderate the extent to which organizations rationally adapt to (environmental) contingencies. To examine this second prediction we compare the effects of strategy and historical performance on the adoption of innovative MAS for organizations with different types of CFOs. We test our hypotheses using a combination of archival and survey data from the public health care sector in Spain. Our results are generally supportive of our hypotheses.

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In this paper we investigate how top management teams (TMTs) use management accounting systems (MAS) for strategy implementation. Consistent with upper echelon theory we argue that professional and administrative TMTs differ in their use of MAS, which in turn affects the implementation of strategic policies. We extract three dimensions of MAS use from extant research on the MAS-strategy relationships. We further distinguish between sets of strategic objectives aimed at cost reduction and flexibility enhancement as part of an overall firm strategy. Hypotheses are developed and tested in a survey study among 884 TMT members in all 218 general hospitals in Spain, forming 92 complete TMTs. Overall, we find systematic differences between professional and administrative TMTs in their use of MAS and its effects on strategy implementation. In a secondary analysis, we explore whether the observed differences in the use of MAS are consistent with the coercive-enabling framework recently introduced into the management accounting literature. We find considerable support for the validity of this framework in our sample. Overall, the paper contributes to the growing literature on the role of MAS in supporting strategy implementation. We extend this literature by explicitly recognizing the role of TMT composition in both strategy implementation and the use of MAS and by providing evidence of the validity of the coerciveenabling framework of MAS in a cross-sectional analysis.

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This paper investigates business unit (BU) controllers’ inclination to engage in the creation of budgetary slack. In particular, we explore whether controllers who are involved in BU decision making are more susceptible to social pressure to engage in slack creation than controllers who are not. We expect, and find, a crucial role of the controller’s personality. Results from an experiment among 136 management accountants suggest that the personality construct Machiavellianism interacts with involvement to explain controllers’ responses to social pressure to create budgetary slack. Controllers scoring high on Machiavellianism are more likely to give in to pressure by BU management to create budgetary slack when they have been involved in decision making. In contrast, controllers scoring low on Machiavellianism are less likely to give in to pressure to create slack when they have been involved in decision making.

This study examines the role of top management team (TMT) heterogeneity in facilitating strategic change. Based on the upper echelons literature, we argue that heterogeneous management teams are better able to handle the simultaneous and conflicting demands of refocusing the organization strategically and keeping up operational performance. We expect this to be true only for teams that are heterogeneous with respect to factors directly related to job requirements, however. Data were collected from 92 full TMTs of hospitals in Spain that were confronted with institutional pressures that challenged their current strategies. In support of our hypotheses, the results show job-related TMT heterogeneity moderates the relation between strategic change and operational performance. No moderating effect is found for non-job-related TMT heterogeneity.