D.M. Swagerman

Understanding the roles of management accountants

Purpose – The goal of this paper is to use a coherent conceptual framework to discern variables (triggers) that affect a management accountants role in an organization, thereby generating a comprehensive empirical picture of the management accountant profession in The Netherlands. Similar research was conducted in 2004, which allows a comparison of the data to see if, and to what extent, developments in the profession have taken place.Design/methodology/approach – Using survey data, groups of management accountants are distinguished based on coherent combinations of activities. Factor and cluster analyses are applied to obtain a segmentation of the data. By doing this, it is established if homogeneous groups of management accountants can be distinguished, how many groups there are and what the characteristics of these groups are in terms of activities.Findings – It was found that controllers either operate as “reporting business analysts” or “business system analysts”. Whether someone is found to be a re...

The Effectiveness of Dutch Executive Pay Packages

Executive pay in the Netherlands has risen sharply in recent years as equity-based compensation grows and boards increasingly adopt the pay-for-performance approach.