Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

Bridging Organizational Resilience and Management Control Systems—A Systematic Review

• In Event: Break and Research Exhibition 1
  In Paper Session: Room 2

Abstract

Organizations have repeatedly faced challenges due to disasters such as pandemics, economic or financial crises, and other unexpected events. One reason why some organizations cope more efficiently than others with such unforeseen circumstances might be their specific resilience design. Despite considerable research on organizational resilience, there is still no consensus on how “resilience” should be defined and understood, how it is conceptualized at the organizational level, and how it interacts with management control systems (MCSs). This study bridges the literatures on MCSs and organizational resilience to provide a broader understanding of how organizations can cope with adverse events.
To identify potential relationships between MCSs and organizational resilience, we perform a systematic review of the literature, which we supplement through content analysis and citation network analysis. We use MCSs to investigate different approaches to achieving organizational resilience, as well as the relationships, trade-offs, and complementarities between organizational resilience measures and management controls. We draw on Simons’s “levers of control” framework and apply complementarity theory to explain the relationship between the design and usage of MCSs on the one hand and organizational resilience on the other. Our study reveals gaps in the literatures on MCSs and organizational resilience and proposes avenues and a preliminary roadmap for future research. Our findings suggest that organizations might strengthen their resilience if they integrate measures of organizational resilience into their MCSs. We also introduce the concepts of resilience-oriented management controls (ROMC) and discuss how organizations could increase their resilience capacity by building such systems (ROMCS).

Authors

• Maximilian Weber, Technische Hochschule Aschaffenburg

• Peter Gordon Roetzel, University of Aschaffenburg