Everything sends a message: The behavioral impacts of conflict between and within accounting control mechanisms

• Main Author: Alward, Amy K
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2007
• Subjects: Accounting; Behavior; Conflict; Employees; Fraud; Fraud prevention; Internal accounting control; Legitimacy; Perceptions; Prevention
• ISBN: 0549485619; 9780549485612

Formal policy reforms as reaction to scandal are inadequate to control undesired behavior when organizational structures endorse opposing actions (Tenbrunsel, A. E., Smith-Crowe, and Umphress 2003). Under such circumstances, undesired behaviors are hypothesized to increase, despite preventative rules. Three experiments tested between subjects impacts of conflicting vs. aligned controls during performance of a generic decoding task on: productivity, error commission and honesty of reporting. In Exp. I, tone at the top of the organization (COSO 2004; 1987) significantly effected the overall behavior of groups than when no guidance was received; also, in the absence of other controls to help employees understand the behaviors expected, subjects appeared to attach meaning to any available message to interpret the system. When the formal policies (Exp. II) of the organization were aligned, error rates and error misstatements were significantly lowered; payment incentives did not reward accurate reporting, but when all controls endorsed the other messages contained in the tone at the top, this additional message was also received and behaviorally achieved. Exp. III tested the effects of informal (social) policies on the overall behavior patterns of subjects; conflicts in selected controls resulted in a significant increase in behaviors considered undesirable by the organization. A particularly interesting finding of Exp. III was: when all elements of the control system aligned, but monitoring was removed, the increased pressure to perform, combined with the message inherent in a lack of controls, resulted in levels of reporting mis-statements similar to those in more conflicted systems.