Association between management incentive systems and management accounting practices

Abstract

The controllability principle posits that managers should be evaluated based on controllable factors. Consequently, managerial incentives might be related to managerial accounting practices able to avoid that managers will be accountable for financial results beyond management control, such as analysis by responsibility center, standard-cost, transfer pricing, budgeting and performance evaluation. This paper develops a field research to investigate whether there is a relation between the presence of managerial incentives and managerial accounting practices associated with the controllability principle. On-site interviews were conducted to collect data at the organizational level and nonparametric statistical tests were used for data analysis. Among the managerial accounting practices examined, the results suggest that only the annual budget, analysis by responsibility center and performance evaluation are associated with the presence of incentive systems in the sampled firms.