What Determines Stewardship Behavior? The Role of Personality and Follow Through

• In Event: Corporate Social Responsibilty, Sustainability, and Stewardship

Abstract

An employee who is a steward gains more utility from pro-organizational behavior than self-serving behavior. In this study, we investigate how stewardship, of vital concern to designers of accounting control systems, is affected by two factors: 1) follow through, which we define as action toward an organizational initiative that is not part of the employee’s formal contract and 2) employee personality traits. We provide experimental evidence that follow through is a key determinant of subsequent stewardship behavior and that the effect depends on personality type. In our data, participants given the opportunity to follow through who are low on a scale of Machiavellianism personality type become less opportunistic while those high on the scale become more opportunistic, relative to participants who do not have the opportunity to follow through. Our results advance the literature exploring personality in accounting settings while documenting an important boundary on the existing stewardship theory expectation that follow through will lead to stewardship behavior.

Authors

• Timothy Brown, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

• Tracie Majors, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

• Thomas William Vance, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign