The balanced scorecard is a new tool that complements traditional measures of business unit performance. The scorecard contains a diverse set of performance measures, including financial performance, customer relations, internal business processes, and learning and growth. Advocates of the balanced scorecard suggest that each unit in the organization should develop and use its own scorecard, choosing measures that capture the unit's business strategy. Our study examines judgmental effects of the balanced scorecard—specifically, how balanced scorecards that include some measures common to multiple units and other measures that are unique to a particular unit affect superiors' evaluations of that unit's performance. Our test shows that only the common measures affect the superiors' evaluations. We discuss the implications of this result for research and practice.
We develop a model of auditor‐client accounting negotiation, using the elements of negotiation examined in the behavioral negotiation literature, elaborated to include accounting contextual features indicated in the accounting literature and suggested by interviews with senior practitioners. We use a questionnaire structured according to the model to describe the elements, contextual features and associations between the two groups in a sample of real negotiations chosen by 93 experienced audit partners. The paper demonstrates important aspects of the sampled accounting negotiations and makes suggestions for further empirical and model development research.
Interest in audit committees as part of overall corporate governance has increased dramatically in recent years, with a specific emphasis on member independence, experience, and knowledge. This paper reports the results of a study investigating whether audit committee members' corporate governance experience and financial-reporting and audit knowledge affect their judgments in auditor-corporate management conflict situations. A sample of 68 audit committee members completed an accounting policy dispute case and several knowledge and ability tests. The results indicate that, as expected, greater independent director experience and greater audit knowledge was associated with higher audit committee member support for an auditor who advocated a “substance over form” approach in the dispute with client management. Conversely, concurrent experience as a board director and a senior member of management was associated with increased support for management. Collectively, these findings have a number of implications for practice and research. The results provide justification for calls that audit committees be composed completely of independent directors. The results also support auditor concerns that varying knowledge levels lead to systematic differences in audit committee member judgments in disputes between auditors and management.
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