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Recent suggestions that nonfinancial measures are essential to overcome the inadequacies of traditional financial measures have led to the widespread adoption of such measures. It is, however, unclear how employees react to these new measures. This study hypothesizes that favorable employee behaviors will only occur if employees perceive performance evaluation criteria as fair. It is therefore important to ascertain if the use of nonfinancial measures as performance criteria is procedurally fair. Based on a sample of 149 managers from the United Kingdom, the results indicate that the use of nonfinancial performance measures was perceived as procedurally fair. We also find that such perceptions are associated with higher organizational commitment which, in turn, enhances employee job performance.

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Prior studies have found a combination of an evaluative style with high budget emphasis and high participation to be associated with better behavioural outcomes (e.g., lower job-related tension) than all other combinations of budget emphasis and participation. Yet there has been little research to investigate the theory on why this particular combination of budget emphasis and participation is associated with better behavioural outcomes. A path analytical model, which investigates the intervening effects of trust and participation on the relationship between budget emphasis and job-related tension, was used. Senior Norwegian managers were selected as subjects for this study. The results indicate that budget emphasis has an insignificant direct effect on job-related tension but a strong indirect effect through trust and participation. Trust also has an intervening effect on the relationship between budgetary participation and job-related tension. It is therefore possible to conclude that high budget emphasis is associated with high budgetary participation and high trust. High trust, in turn, is associated with reduced subordinates' job-related tension.The impact of performance evaluative styles on subordinates' attitudes and performance has been the focus of much management accounting research (Briers and Hirst, 1990;Lindsay and Ehrenberg, 1993;Hartmann and Moers, 1999;Otley and Fakiolas, 2000;Hartmann, 2000). The first systematic work in this area by Hopwood (1972) indicated that an inflexible approach in the use of accounting data to evaluate subordinates' performance was associated with subordinates' jobrelated tension and other dysfunctional behaviour. Otley (1978), however, was unable to replicate these results. Since then, a stream of studies has examined a variety of variables which could influence the relationships between performance evaluative styles and a variety of behavioural outcome variables (e.g.

Abstract-Prior miinagement accounting studies on fairness perceptions have overlooked two important issues. First, no prior managetnent accuunling studies have investigated how procedural fairness, by itself, affects managers'job satisfaction. Second, management accounting researchers have not demonstrated how conflicting theories on procedural fairness can he integrated and explained in a coherent manner. Our model proposes that fairness of procedures for performance evaluation affects joh satisfaction through two distinct processes. The first is outconie-hased through fairness of outcomes (distributive fairness). The second is non-outcome-based through trust in superior and organisational commitment. Based on a sample of 110 managers, the results indicale that while procedural fairness perceptions affect job satisfaction through both processes, the non-outcome-based process is much stronger than the outcome-based process. These results may be used to develop u unified theory on procedural fairness effects.