Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

The Effect of Enabling Controls on Learning-by-Doing

• In Event: Control Systems (Experimental) III

Abstract

Firms use controls to direct employees’ attention to task-relevant information to improve learning-by-doing and task performance. We investigate which combination of control features improves learning. Because control systems are imperfect, prior studies argue that employees should have the opportunity to override (flexibility) or adapt (repair) the controls. However, the added cognitive burden of overriding and adapting the systems will hamper immediate performance and so learning if the purpose of the controls is not clearly explained to the employees (internal transparency). In an online experiment, we find that the combination of repair and internal transparency improves performance but not the combination of flexibility and internal transparency. We attribute the latter effect to the need to continuously pay attention to the controls with flexibility, while controls can be changed permanently with repair.

Authors

• Yuelong Ma, the University of Western Australia

• Stijn Masschelein, University of Western Australia