Accounting for trust: some empirical evidence

Has Management Accounting Research been critical?

“…If new systems are not institutionalised they can reproduce old routines, e.g. new performance evaluation routines transpired not to be tools for improving organisational performance but reproduced habitual thoughts, actions, and relied on trust (Johansson and Baldvinsdottir, 2003). However, accounting can become significant during revolutionary change, e.g.…”

Trust for accounting and accounting for trust

“…Consequently, change has become a pervasive feature of organisational life. The role of accounting and control systems within processes of organisational learning and transformation has been widely debated in the literature (see, among the others, Hopwood, 1987;Argyris, 1990;Dent, 1990;Gray, 1990;Cobb et al, 1995;Otley and Berry, 1994;Coad, 1995;Kloot, 1997;Burns and Scapens, 2000;Meer-Kooistra and Vosselman, 2000;Johansson and Baldvinsdottir, 2003;Seal et al, 2004;Bhimani and Roberts, 2004). Various writers have illustrated the potential of accounting for visualising, analysing and measuring the current state of a business, for questioning operational and managerial strategies, and for justifying new courses of action (Hopwood, 1990;Ezzamel et al, 1998).…”

In female supervisors male subordinates trust!? An experiment on supervisor and subordinate gender and the perceptions of tight control

“…As a first step to more systematically and thoroughly starting to focus on this issue, we conducted a vignette experiment investigating perceptions of evaluation fairness and trust in management in a tight control situation depending on superior and subordinate gender. Along with, for example, the focus on formality and the feedback quality of controls (Coletti et al 2005;Hartmann and Slapničar 2009), the role of the choice of performance metrics (Lau and Sholihin 2005;Hartmann and Slapničar 2012), the role of formality in performance measurement systems and tolerance of ambiguity (Hartmann and Slapničar 2012), budgeting participation (Lau and Buckland 2001) and the way the performance evaluation process is carried out (Johansson and Baldvinsdottir 2003) for trust in management and fairness perceptions of controls, our study shows that the gender of individuals in the supervisor-subordinate dyad is also a concept affecting perceptions of controls when placed in a tight control context (Van der Stede 2001). Building on influential theories within psychology and leadership research about gender roles and gender role bias, we hypothesised that male subordinates are more accustomed to tight and autocratic contexts and thus respond less negatively to such controls, and that female superiors are seen as less congruent with their social role in a tight control situation and will therefore evoke a more negative reaction than male superiors.…”

“…Researchers have investigated different aspects of the control system and its relationship to individual and contextual factors in order to explain variations in trust and perceived fairness (Hartmann andSlapničar 2009, 2012;Baldvinsdottir et al 2011;Wennblom 2012). These aspects include, on the one hand, design attributes such as the formality and objectivity of the evaluation process (Hartmann and Slapničar 2009), feedback quality (Coletti et al 2005;Hartmann and Slapničar 2009), and budget participation (Lau and Buckland 2001;Lau and Tan 2006), and on the other hand features related to how the evaluation process is used and carried out by superiors (Johansson and Baldvinsdottir 2003). However, with the knowledge that research in other disciplines has found evident gender differences in trust and fairness perceptions (e.g.…”