Joachim SchaußFunctional Fixation im Management Reporting

About this book deutschenglish

The author provides evidence concerning managers’ inability to adapt to changes in the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). The BSC has been implemented in a wide range of companies and consultants have put huge effort into developing the BSC further. However, by transferring insights from financial accounting and auditing, the author finds that decision makers do not adequately react to changes in BSC measures. Instead he shows that changing features of the BSC (increasing data quality by implementing externally benchmarked measures) is not reflected in a majority of judgments.

The author also depicts that individual differences in decision making style, i.e. a preference for intuition or deliberation render the judgment process and the likelihood to adapt to changes of BSC features. He argues that it is not only necessary to understand the impact of BSC features on managers’ judgments, but to focus on individual differences of the decision maker.

By applying a computer-based process tracing method he finally shows that the overreliance on financial information can already be observed in the pre-decisional phase of the decision makers’ judgments, i.e. participants show a biased information acquisition pattern towards financial information. Thus applying a sophisticated methodological approach that is heavily used in cognitive psychology and consumer research he can extend previous research on the weighting of financial and non-financial measures in management reports.

All in all, the author provides new insights in understanding judgmental processes in a BSC setting in general and decision makers’ reactions to changes in the BSC in particular. To monitor biased information acquisition patterns he implemented a methodological approach, called MouselabWEB, which is, to the best of his knowledge, novel in behavioral research in management accounting. He argues that his findings are informative for practitioners as well as researchers and that the process tracing method he applied provides new directions for research on the Balanced Scorecard.

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