The Impact of Managers’ Related Variables and Department Features on Budget Characteristics: The Case of Private Jordanian Universities

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of manager and department variables on budget characteristics in private Jordanian universities. This paper aims to study the relationship between the departments' heads characteristics and department features with the budget participation, information sharing, budget adequacy, goal clarity, and budget feedback in private universities in Jordan. It draws on relevant prior studies in the management accounting particularly budget issues to formulate the research questions and implementing survey method with seventy seven functional managers in five private Jordanian universities to shed light upon the perceptions of proposed budget participants. The results indicate that there is no such a relation between the department type and size with the budget characteristics, and no significant association between most of the manager related variables and budget characteristics. In contrast, the results indicate that the experience earned in the university has a significant strong relation with budget characteristics and weak relation has been found between manager budget experience and budget characteristics. The data suggest that the department factors and the manager factors except the experience earned in the university and the budget experience have no impact on budget characteristics. Hence, the budget characteristics may influence other factors such as the management style, departmental autonomy. Keywords: Budget characteristics, Manager related factors, Department features, Private Jordanian universities 1. IntroductionPrior studies demonstrate that the budget is an important tool of management accounting in terms of control, coordination, and decision-making (Drury, 2008;Covaleski et al., 2003;and Mah'd, 2010). Furthermore, great attention has been given to the influence of budgetary systems in the control of organisations in terms of the size, structure, managerial autonomy, and external environment (Merchant, 1981;Ezzamel, 1990;and Bruns & Waterhouse, 1975). By contrast, little attention appears to be directed to the question of how the budgetary process in university departments varies regarding to manager characteristics and department characteristics. Furthermore, few studies have researched budget participation, information sharing, goal clarity, budget adequacy and budget feedback in private universities in developing countries. This study tends to shed light on the relationship between the demographic variables and the budget characteristics in private Jordanian universities. Budget characteristics in the current research are identified as budget participation, information sharing, goal clarity, budget adequacy and budget feedback. The need for participative budgeting has been clarified in the literature. Great attention in the management accounting literature focuses on the impact of the participative budgetary process on outcome variables such as job performance (Stedry, 1960;Milani, 1975;Kren, 1992;Nouri & Parker, 1998; Fisher et al., 2006;and Parker & Kyj ...

Evaluation of practical accounting education in Jordan

“…Referring to the interviews that were conducted before the questionnaires, factors were revealed during the meeting with the professors which described the wicked results of the internship, as they cited, "there is a huge student number that makes controlling them very difficult". Additionally, Nasser et al (2011) said of the difficulties of running the internship in Jordan that there are 21 universities and a significant number offer accounting programmes. The number of accounting graduates from these universities exceeds the level of 3,000 students a year.…”