The assessed usefulness of management accounting in Romania and Poland: a comparative contingency-based study

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how selected contingency factors, such as the company profile and the managers’ profile, impact on the usefulness of management accounting (MA) in two Eastern European countries: Romania and Poland. In order to achieve the objective of the paper, we employed a questionnaire-based survey addressed to managers of randomly selected companies from various industries. Data were processed by means of several statistical tests, as well as classification and regression trees (C&RT) and the results were interpreted in the historical context of the two countries. Our investigation showed that management accounting in both countries is oriented towards providing useful information for budgeting and cost control. There is no interest in preparing and communicating information meant to support strategy implementation. It was also found that the information delivered to management is seldom employed in supporting the decision-making process, where its usefulness is rated as relatively low. The most important predictor variable for the assessment of Polish managers is the origin of the company’s capital, followed by the education of the managers, while in Romania the assessment is mainly influenced by the managers’ function and the origin of capital. The paper contributes to the development of literature in this field by complementing the existing research on MA development in CEE countries, and identifying the internal factors that lead to managers from the two countries perceiving MA usefulness differently.
 Keywords: management accounting information; usefulness; assessment; comparison; contingency factors; classification and regression trees

Strategic management accounting and strategic management: The mediating effect of performance evaluation and rewarding

“…First, from a geographical point of view, the area of Eastern and Central Europe is subject to less research aimed at SMA published in high-quality journals than Western Europe. There are numerous papers dealing with various individual tools of SMA (e.g., budgeting [43], activity based costing [44]- [45], Balanced Scorecard [46]), but not with SMA tech- competition and perceived environmental uncertainty None [29] influence of company size and strategy type None [30] perceived environmental uncertainty, historical performance, life cycle stage, structure (centralization/ decentralization), size of company, strategy type, and quality of information system None [31] historical performance, perceived environmental uncertainty, proportion of service on total sales, size, strategy type and top management team characteristics None [32] competition, dynamic use, dynamic tension, interactive use, membership in a group, proportion of services on total sales, size, subsidiary None [33] perceived environmental uncertainty None [34] company size, perceived environmental uncertainty, strategy type, and industry None [35] product characteristics, production technology, information demand of managers, qualification of accountants, business environment, size, and age None [36] company profile and manager profiles None [37] life cycle of a firm company performance [38] accountant participation in strategic processes, deliberate strategy formulation, market orientation, size of company, strategy type company performance [27] differentiation strategy exploratory innovation [39] None company performance [40] None internal and external capabilities of a firm and strategic position [41] None company performance [42] Source: own literature review niques as a whole.…”