Decoding Effort: Toward a Measure of Effort Intensity in Management Accounting Research.

• In Event: Effort Effects in Management Accounting

Abstract

Prior research in accounting has established a widely-accepted framework of the relationship
between incentives and performance (Bonner and Sprinkle 2002). Effort plays an important
mediating role in this framework. Bonner and Sprinkle (2002) further describe a number of
facets of the effort construct in effort direction, duration and effort intensity. Our study focuses
on effort intensity and introduces a new measure of intensity based on the measurement of the
size of the pupil (cognitive pupillometry) to overcome previous reliance on indirect proxies of
intensity. We leverage well established theories and utilize a laboratory experiment to validate
our measure. Our results validate the effort intensity measure and confirm that the incentive to
performance relationship is mediated by effort intensity. We further show that effort intensity is
a dynamic rather than static phenomenon.

Authors

• Gary W Hecht, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

• Kristian Rotaru, Monash University - Caulfield

• Axel Klaus-Dieter Schulz, La Trobe University

• Kristy L Towry, Emory University

• Alan Webb, University of Waterloo