Accounting Perspectives最新文献

The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated an extensive involuntary shift to remote work and has since dramatically reshaped work and its supervision. We examine how employees' perceived productivity is associated with remote work during the pandemic, how supervisory controls moderate this relationship, and how remote work and perceived productivity impact employee preference for post-pandemic remote work. We survey 589 workers in June 2020 via Mechanical Turk and find a directionally positive but nonsignificant association between remote work and perceived productivity. Additional analysis, however, indicates an indirect positive effect of remote work on perceived productivity through more hours worked. We further find supervisory monitoring intensity (SMI) is positively associated with perceived productivity, and the association between remote work and perceived productivity is more negative with more intense supervisory monitoring. Outcome-based evaluation is also positively associated with perceived productivity, but it does not moderate the relationship between remote work and perceived productivity. Supervisor-based evaluation has no significant association with perceived productivity, nor does it moderate the relationship between remote work and perceived productivity. Overall, our results suggest the main effect of remote work on perceived productivity during the pandemic is weak at best, and SMI is less compatible with remote work supervision than outcome-based evaluation. Finally, we find increased remote work and perceived productivity improvement during the pandemic are positively associated with preference for post-pandemic remote work, and we find a marginal positive interaction effect between them. These findings provide empirical evidence of the pandemic's repercussions on the post-pandemic work environment.

In incentive contracts, supervisors often set targets for employee performance, while employees decide the effort they are willing to exert to meet the target and earn the incentive. Both supervisors and employees make judgments about the value of incentives in terms of effort required or expended. Recent research on incentive types investigates employee effort in response to tangible and cash rewards under the premise that they may be valued differently by employees. We extend this research by investigating whether supervisors and employees make different effort-related decisions in response to tangible and cash rewards. Specifically, relying on construal-level theory, we predict that supervisors will favor tangible rewards relative to cash more than employees will. We conduct a lab experiment where we ask participants to take the role of either supervisor or employee. We manipulate the reward type (tangible or cash) and measure how much work supervisors demand and employees are willing to provide to obtain the reward. As predicted, we find that the tangible rewards, relative to cash, increase supervisors' target setting significantly more than employee effort levels. Our results offer implications for real-world incentive compensation design.

This case exposes students to an intriguing industry: film production and distribution. The focus on relevant costing allows students to make recommendations about keeping, dropping, or expanding a distribution channel and about venturing into a new technology for film distribution. The analysis requires critical thinking. Because students are provided with relatively sparse financial information, they are less likely to be fixated on data and more likely to think critically about how to structure analyses to address strategic and operational issues being weighed by the studio. In addition, the case requires students to communicate their recommendations and the underlying assumptions effectively. This case is suitable for use in undergraduate and graduate managerial and cost accounting courses, introductory MBA courses in managerial accounting or strategic thinking, or undergraduate or graduate courses that are specific to the entertainment industry.

This study investigates the effect of gamification on employee boredom and performance in a repetitive work process. In video games, loot is unpredictable, intermittent rewards used to motivate players to repeat boring actions. In a 2 × 1 laboratory experiment, I examine how gamification, featuring nonmonetary loot point rewards, may impact boredom and performance. I find that individuals have mixed opinions. On the one hand, they recognize the emotional value of gamification and find the repetitive work process more attractive. On the other hand, they experience a violation of fairness even though the point rewards do not impact their monetary payoff. My findings help reconcile the seemingly contradictory predictions from two sets of motivation theories. While some conventional theories (e.g., equity theory, expectancy theory, and agency theory) suggest that unpredictable rewards negatively affect motivation, both the reinforcement theory of motivation and findings from neuroscience research indicate a bright side to those rewards. Due to the countervailing effects, I do not find a significant difference in either boredom or performance between conditions. My results show that when gamifying repetitive work processes with unpredictable rewards such as loot points, managers need to address fairness concerns while maintaining the motivational properties of gamification.