Mandy M. Cheng

Persistence in capital budgeting reinvestment decisions - personal responsibility antecedent and information asymmetry moderator: A note

In this study we examine the effects of personal responsibility and information asymmetry on managers’ tendencies to escalate their commitment to poorly performing investment projects. Consistent with the recommendations by critics of the escalation literature (e.g. Bowen, 1987), we provided subjects with unequivocal negative project feedback. However, counter to other recent conflicting studies adopting Bowen’s recommendations, we reverted back to Staw’s (1976) original methodology and incorporated “free-choice” into our personal responsibility construct. Our results confirm Staw’s (1976) original proposition of a positive relation between a manager’s personal responsibility for a poorly performing project and his/her subsequent escalation of commitment to the project. Further, we proposed that information asymmetry moderates the relation between the level of personal responsibility and escalation of commitment. Our results did not confirm this proposition. As such, results from our study re-establish personal responsibility as an important antecedent variable to escalation of commitment.

Knowledge transfer in project reviews: the effect of self-justification bias and moral hazard

In this study, we examine two factors that impact managers’ willingness to share private information during the project review stage of capital budgeting. Drawing on the cognitive dissonance theory and the agency theory, we find that both high perceived personal responsibility and the use of project reviews for performance evaluation result in a greater tendency for managers to withhold negative private information. However, we do not find an interaction between these two factors. Our study makes a contribution to both the academic literature investigating factors affecting project reviews and the practitioner literature looking at design and implementation of effective project reviews.

Managing strategic uncertainty: The diversity and use of performance measures in the balanced scorecard

Purpose - Strategic uncertainty from emerging threats and opportunities in the business environment can significantly impact managers’ abilities to successfully implement their business strategy. A key strategic control and governance mechanism designed to enable managers to respond to strategic uncertainty is a strategic performance measurement system, such as the balanced scorecard (BSC). This study aims to investigate whether strategic uncertainty is associated with the diversity and types of performance measures in a BSC, which are used by managers for various strategic control and governance purposes. Design/methodology/approach - A survey of senior-level managers within strategic business units of Australian Stock Exchange listed organizations was conducted. Findings - This study finds that the extent to which managers face strategic uncertainty is positively associated with performance measurement diversity. Further, managers faced with greater strategic uncertainty use performance measures relatively more to evaluate subordinates’ performance, communicate business strategy, track performance against targets, identify problem areas and guide future directions. Outcome measures are used to a greater extent for all five purposes, whereas leading measures are used more only for future-oriented purposes. Practical implications - Strategic performance measurement systems, such as the BSC, can and are being used to provide managers with the information and control mechanisms necessary to meet the challenges associated with strategic uncertainty. Originality/value - This study provides the first evidence on the relations between strategic uncertainty, performance measurement diversity and managers’ use of performance measures for five key purposes. Understanding these relations is important, as managers need to formulate appropriate responses to strategic uncertainty, to protect and create value by exploiting emerging opportunities and managing associated threats.

The Impact of Capital Proposal Guidelines and Perceived Preparer Biases on Reviewers’ Investment Evaluation Decisions

Past literature has highlighted the importance of using reviewers in the evaluation of investment proposals. This study examines whether and how the decisions of these reviewers are influenced by a proposal’s conformance with company guidelines and practices, and the incentives facing the proposal preparer. Our experiment shows that, holding the proposal’s content constant, the reviewers’ evaluation decision is less favourable if the proposal does not follow the company guidelines. Further, we find that the preparer’s incentive to persist in a project negatively affects the proposal reviewers’ decisions only when the proposal deviates from company guidelines but not when it is compliant. This result suggests that company guidelines may lower the willingness of reviewers to make independent decisions.

Getting to Know You: Trust Formation in New Interfirm Relationships and the Consequences for Investments in Management Control and the Collaboration†

Trust is often posited to substitute for management control in interfirm transactions. However, this raises questions of how trust arises in new relationships, and whether trust that is not based on prior experience transacting together is sufficient to persuade managers to forego investments in management controls. We use experimental methods to test whether two features of the early stage of an interfirm relationship influence a buyer’s initial trust in a supplier and have consequences for subsequent investments in management controls and in the collaboration. These two features are the autonomy of the buyer’s manager to choose a supplier (i.e., delegation of decision-making authority) and the supplier’s willingness to share information with the buyer. We find that the buyer manager’s initial trust in the supplier is associated positively with both the autonomy to choose the supplier and the supplier’s willingness to share information. Information content and supplier characteristics are held constant, so these results are novel and distinct from prior studies of the antecedents of trust. We find that higher initial trust is associated with reduced expenditures for management controls and increased investments in the collaboration. Thus, we conclude that delegation of decision-making authority and supplier information-sharing behavior in the early stages of a relationship influence the formation of initial trust, which has real consequences for investments in management control and in the collaboration.

Strategic Performance Measurement Systems and Managerial Judgements

The introduction of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) by Kaplan and Norton in the early 1990s has put performance measurement system design firmly on many executives’ agendas. A 2009 Bain & Co. survey of 1,430 international executives reported that the BSC ranks sixth among 25 popular management tools, with a global adoption rate of 53 per cent (Rigby and Bilodeau, 2009). Contemporary performance measurement systems (often referred to as strategic performance measurement systems), such as the BSC, have a number of distinguishing features. In particular, these systems: (1) contain a diverse range of performance measures that reflect the organisation’s key strategic areas, and (2) illustrate the cause-and-effect linkages between operations, strategy and goals, and between various aspects of the value chain (Chenhall, 2005). Many professional and academic articles have been published on the benefits, design and implementation processes associated with various types of strategic performance measurement systems (e.g., the BSC, Tableu de bord, and the performance pyramid). The aim of this chapter is not to add to the extant literature comparing the merits of different performance measurement frameworks; rather, it takes a different, ‘behavioural’ perspective by focusing on how the design features of strategic performance measurement systems influence individual managers’ judgements.