When faced with new competitive pressures, firms may adopt CI practices but experience only limited success, or even failure. A key reason for these disappointing results is that employment contracts built on the existing culture provide little or no incentive for employees to actually seek improvements. However, the linear contracts introduced with CI implementation (e.g., failure rates, delivery time, customer satisfaction) are not always effective. Lambert (2001) suggests that accounting contracts should only be considered when linear contracting fails. One reason for this position is the assumption that the AIS is better aligned with company value and thus forms a more efficient basis for contractually-bounded rational decisions. Thus, realigning the AIS is a necessary component for efficient accounting-based employment contracting.
However, there are problems with contracting in practice. Participation in standard, and target- based, costing systems insures information sharing to build more accurate budgets. But this budgeting process gives employees the opportunity and incentive to build slack into their budget goals in order to reduce the risk of budget failure. Thus, in the traditional budgeting process, production standards, rather than motivating employees to utilize their knowledge and skills to improve business processes, tend to deskill, disempower, and control workers (Braverman 1974; Clawson 1980; Miller and O’Leary 1987; Hoskin and Macve 1988a, b; Ezzamel, Hoskin, and Macve 1990; Hopper and Armstrong 1991; Stewart 1992; and Walsh and Stewart 1993). Although management has adopted a new strategy of CI, the existing MCS business culture and its budget-based employment contracts may not be adequately aligned with the new strategy. Hence, the CI practices eventually prove to be disappointing, because a complementary adaptive MCS culture (Chenhall and Langfield-Smith 2003) is missing.
A solution to this problem may be to modify the current MCS to reduce shirking and resistance to a CI culture. Before discussing the design of an MCS that monitors the implementation and supports the management of the CI culture, the basic characteristics of a business culture and the particular aspects of the CI culture must first be defined.
CULTURE, LEARNING, UNCERTAINTY, AND TRUST
Culture may be defined as, “the pattern of basic assumptions that a given group has invented, discovered, or developed in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, and that have worked well enough to be considered valid, and, therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems” (Schein 1984). More simply, it is “the way we do things around here” (Williams et al. 1994).阳光国际会议中心暑假实习报告
Cultural norms form the bounded本文来自辣.文,论-文·网原文请找腾讯3249.114 governs the employment relation” (Covaleski et al. 2003). When profitability is an accepted norm of the business culture, accounting systems can validate new ideas and procedures. Thus, a powerful role for accounting systems is assured when new ideas can be validated by framing decisions with accounting values linked to employment contracts.
CREATING CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT EMPLOYMENT CONTRACTS
When transitioning to a CI culture, the quality literature clearly identifies cultural resistance as a major factor of frustration. For example, the need to change the “them and us” relationship between operations employees and management is a recurring theme (Westrup, Hopper, and Jazayeri 2001, p. 27). In order for these two parties to work cooperatively toward continuous improvement, new contractual relationships must be established.
We contend that such an accounting-based employment contract requires a well understood and timely budgeting system aligned with new strategies to validate changes as they occur. The CI- AIS reduces uncertainty, and hence risk, by enabling employees and managers to gauge the legitimacy of their new activities against the cost-benefit metric of corporate earnings.
Thus, when transitioning to a CI culture, the norm of profitability can enhance the productivity expansion in several ways. First, it can identify inappropriate behavior. Any activity that can be accurately identified as unprofitable can be dismissed with credibility. Second, adaptive variances can uncover opportunities for a more efficient productivity expansion path . Third, it sets boundaries for rational analysis limited to profitability. Fourth, it can aid in contracting to reduce agency risk and increasing mutual trust, cooperation, morale, and the willingness to learn and share risk with a view toward improvement. Hence, the AIS should be designed to align employment contracts with a new culture based on the norm of profitability.CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
The first three steps of an innovative action research approach are to identify the pro 论企业职工的继续教育 blem, use existing research to offer a new solution, and apply the solution. After identifying the problem of resistance to cultural change, this paper offers a solution for implementing and managing CI using existing research and then applies it in practice. As offered by Kaplan (1998), the elements of the application that have merit will be amplified and developed in future improvements in the fourth innovative action research stage – improvement. Over the six months of development and implementation, throughput for the work center in our research case improved 35 percent, and after a period of two years the company is still using the AIS system for process management.
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