Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

Top Management Characteristics as Antecedents to Budget Use

• In Event: Break/Research Exhibition 1: Budgeting and Target Setting

Abstract

So far, management accounting research has devoted scant attention to managerial characteristics as possible antecedents to why budgets are used for different purposes. Drawing on the upper echelons theory, the objective of this paper is to examine whether three observable top management characteristics (tenure, education and gender) influence how comprehensive the focus on the different purposes of budgets is, while several other possible antecedents are controlled for. Data collected from 152 senior managers of large Finnish and Swedish manufacturing companies were analysed with PLS. The findings indicate that tenure, education, size and strategy influence how comprehensive the focus on the different purposes of budgets is in a statistically significant way. Overall, these findings support the view that at least some individual level characteristics could be examined as determinants of budgeting choices in future research.

Authors

• Eva Stroem, Hanken School of Economics

• Lili-Anne Kihn, Tampere University