Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

From Online Content to Offline Results: Effects of a Best Practices Initiative on an Enterprise Social Network

• In Event: Control Systems (Mixed Methods)

Abstract

In this paper we examine the effects of a best practices initiative on an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) with a natural field experiment in a large retail chain. Our results do not show an immediate improvement in sales, but show an improvement in sales trends in the treatment group relative to the control group, amounting to a 3.67% sales increase by the end of the 4-month initiative. Furthermore, we find that the effects of the initiative were more positive in stores serving markets that were more similar to the markets of the best-practices units and in stores with fewer nearby same-company stores. We also find that the initiative was most effective when employees perceived their regional managers to be less rather than more trustworthy and supportive prior to the intervention. Overall, these results suggest that a best practices initiative in an ESN could lead to an improvement in sales, especially among the units for which the knowledge was most relevant, the knowledge was ex-ante less accessible, and who perceived a lower level of trust for the managers. Our findings have important implications for the use of information sharing systems (such as ESNs) as effective management control tools for improving performance.

Authors

• Shelley Li, University of Southern California

• Tatiana Sandino, Harvard University Business School