The effects of budgetary knowledge and extrinsic motivation on the importance that managers attribute to their budgets

Abstract

We investigate whether the budgetary knowledge of managers and their extrinsic motivation affect the importance that they attribute to their budgets. Our study further assesses whether these effects differ in accordance with the hierarchical level of the managers and the pooled, the sequential and the reciprocal groups of tasks that they perform. These hypotheses are empirically tested by applying linear structural equation modelling to the responses from a sample of 229 managers. Our results demonstrate that knowledge and extrinsic motivation have a positive effect on the attribution of importance to budgets; an effect that is moderated by both the hierarchical level of managers and organisational interdependencies.

En este trabajo se investiga si el conocimiento presupuestario y la motivación extrínseca influencian la importancia que los directivos atribuyen a sus presupuestos. Se evalúa, asimismo, si estos efectos difieren según el nivel jerárquico de los directivos y, de las tareas agrupadas, secuenciales y recíprocas que realizan. Estas hipótesis son contrastadas con un modelo lineal de ecuaciones estructurales, en una muestra poblacional de 229 directivos. Nuestros resultados demuestran que el conocimiento y la motivación extrínseca tienen un efecto positivo sobre la atribución de importancia a los presupuestos, efecto que es moderado tanto por el nivel jerárquico como por las interdependencias organizativas.

Keywords:

• budget
• importance
• attribution theories
• knowledge
• extrinsic motivation

Palabras clave:

• Presupuesto
• Importancia
• Teorías de Atribución
• Motivación Extrínseca

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge David Naranjo (the associate editor) and reviewers of Spanish Journal of Finance and Accounting for their comments and suggestions. Salvador Carmona-Moreno (Instituto de Empresa), Michael Fogarty (Case Western University) and Ignacio Urrutia-de Hoyos (Antonio de Nebrija University) are thanked for their supportive comments on early drafts of this paper. The paper is solely the responsibility of the authors.

Notes

1. Together with these biases, there are also other individual differences that discriminate between perceivers (Fiske & Taylor, 1991), for example, some people are more motivated by internal causes than others (Weiner, 2010).

2. In pooled interdependencies, each organizational unit performs tasks independently (e.g., human resources department). In sequential interdependencies, a dynamic interaction exists in the form of a serial sequence of internal transfers between different organizational units (e.g., assembly lines), which implies one-way interdependencies. With reciprocal interdependencies, the outputs of each unit move back and forth between the different units that constitute the organization (e.g., manufacturing teams), which implies two-way interdependencies.

3. We expected to find close similarities with managers working in the same organization, as they operated within a common budgetary framework. However, the views of these individuals varied widely. Moreover, we found no significant differences between managers in different sectors, which may be because the sample size of managers working in public and non-profit organizations is small (only 29 managers).

4. We also asked the managers to state any additional questions that they considered relevant for the importance attributed to budgets. None forwarded additional questions.

5. These beliefs about what managers should receive are influenced by their pay histories, inputs, job characteristics, non-monetary outcomes and social referents (Lawler, 1971).

6. Since all of the parameters obtained were more than 0.66, they were all accepted as valid measurements.

7. LISREL directly reports R² values for measurement equations and structural equations by using its SIMPLIS syntax.

8. Where the recommended threshold values are 0.95, 0.95, under 0.07, up to 0.90, and under 0.08, respectively (Hooper, Coughlan, & Mullen, 2008).

9. However, EM had its strongest effect on importance for those managers involved in sequential interdependencies, and not for those in pooled interdependencies.

10. Some authors have found acceptable values of NNFI and AGFI of up to 0.80 (Hooper et al., 2008; Leeflang, Wittink, Wedel, & Naert, 2000). Furthermore, in situations where small samples were used both values might indicate a poor fit despite other statistics that point towards a good fit. For models with small degrees of freedom and small samples, the RMSEAs might also exceed the cut-offs of 0.07 or 0.08 (still acceptable), provided that the model was correctly specified (Kenny, Kaniskan, & McCoach, in press). Under such circumstances, we checked for problems of misspecification in our model, for example, by checking for zero-valued modification indices.

Additional information

Funding

Susana Gago-Rodriguez acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (2004, 2007, 2011 and 2014) and the Community of Madrid (2006 and 2007) to develop this research.