The Impact of Propagating Management Accounting Innovations on Organizational Culture

Abstract

Regarding the tremendous changes effected in the domain of modern technologies and information technologies, firms are required to adopt management accounting innovations to continue their operations. While the extant literature has focused on developed countries, the present project is set to determine the extent to which management accounting innovations are applied in firms in the context of a developing country - Iran. As cultural factors play a major role in propagating management accounting innovations, the ongoing research aims to examine the cultural dimensions of Edgar Schein's model and their association with management accounting innovations. Organizational culture is composed of such dimensions as external (superficial) adaptation including strategy, targets, and control systems and tools, and internal cohesion consisting of shared language, definition of group boundary, rewards and punishments, and power relations and position. Management accounting innovations include activity-based costing, activity-based management, balanced scorecard and benchmarking. As a field-descriptive study, this research employs two questionnaires to collect the necessary data. To analyze the data, firms are divided into two groups, namely one with management accounting innovations and the other one without these innovations. Afterwards, various methods like Mann-Whitney test, comparison of means test, mean ranks of two independent population as well as t-test, Wilcoxon test, and Kruskal–Wallis test were adopted to test the research hypotheses. Regarding the results of testing the research hypotheses at 95% level of significance, one can conclude a significantly direct relationship between using management accounting innovations and organizational culture. The results reveal that applying management accounting concepts, methods and innovations assist firms and organizations in achieving organizational goals, improving operations, and increasing the efficiency of the managerial decisions. Since organizational culture is a prerequisite for accounting profession, adopting and implementing management accounting innovations are a function of organizational culture.