Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether trust and distrust in upper-level managers exert different influences on the budgetary proposals of middle managers. Such proposals involve different levels of managerial effort that impact overall budgetary slack. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on a laboratory experiment with 160 business managers. Findings The results show that the more (less) middle managers trust (distrust) their upper-level managers, the more (the less) effort they commit to budgetary proposals. The authors also find that middle managers with low trust are prone to invest more effort and thus create less budgetary slack than managers with high distrust. The results also show that the introduction of suspicion does not vary this initial choice of effort and budgetary slack. Research limitations/implications This paper shows the importance of trust and distrust as informal control systems in organizations. The findings support the importance of extrinsic motivation for enhancing effort and reducing budgetary slack. There are a wide range of exogenous variables that have an effect on the development of trust and distrust. Practical implications Practitioners may improve their management control by facilitating trust and preventing distrust in interpersonal relationships because both are informal controls that can reduce and increase, respectively, dysfunctional behaviors in organizations, such as budgetary slack. Originality/value This paper is among the first to show the distinct effects of trust and distrust (high and low) in the efforts of middle managers. This study provides a dynamic viewpoint of trust through the introduction of suspicion in a budget negotiation.

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This study explores the rationality behind firms' decision to admit or deny their involvement in bribery when responding to confidential surveys conducted by international agencies (such as the World Bank). Specifically, we posit that firms' reluc-tance to provide accurate information about their engagement in bribery is at least to some extent contingent on certain situ-ational factors. In other words, we claim that this behavior is context dependent. The paper uses the notions provided by the theory of planned behavior to understand the way in which the corruption of the legal environment, the intensity of market competition, and identification risk influence firms' decision to lie about their involvement in bribery.To test these notions, we use databases from the fifth wave of the EBRD-World Bank Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, country-level data from the Kauffman Foundation and macroeconomic (i.e., countrylevel) information from the World Bank database. We run ordinary least squares with geographic region-clustered standard errors on data from 30 countries and 6122 individual firms during the period 2012-2013. Consistent with our expectations, the results indicate that firms operating within more corrupt legal environments, facing more competition, and bearing a higher risk of being identified are less likely to deny their involvement in bribery. We conclude that not all firms have the same incentives to lie about their participation in bribery, and therefore, identifying the drivers of this heterogeneity may help policymakers better assess the reliability of bribery information collected through confidential surveys.

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Prior management accounting research has addressed how organizational culture may substitute or complement the use of decision-making and control of management accounting systems (MASs). However, this paper argues that not all organizational cultures and MASs are equal. Their compatibility determines whether their usage together creates any positive or negative synergies. This paper follows a 2017 survey-based methodology with 102 managers of different nationalities. Collected responses indicate the role that culture plays in their usage of the balanced scorecard (BSC) and their consciousness concerning Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Remarkably, our survey of managers reveals that adaptive cultures create positive synergies with the BSC and, consequently, positive judgments on the KPI scale. Las investigaciones anteriores sobre contabilidad de gestión han abordado cómo la cultura organizativa puede sustituir o complementar el uso de la toma de decisiones y el control de los sistemas de contabilidad de gestión (SCG). Sin embargo, este artículo sostiene que no todas las culturas organizativas y los SCG son iguales. Su compatibilidad determina si su uso conjunto crea sinergias positivas o negativas. Este trabajo sigue una metodología basada en una encuesta realizada en 2017 a 102 directivos de diferentes nacionalidades. Las respuestas recogidas indican el papel que desempeña la cultura en el uso del cuadro de mando integral (CMI) y su conciencia sobre los indicadores clave de rendimiento (ICR). De forma notable, nuestra encuesta a los directivos revela que las culturas adaptativas crean sinergias positivas con el CMI y, en consecuencia, juicios positivos en la escala de los ICR.