Cherry Picking for Self-Enhancement – Managers’ KPI Requests From Self-Reporting Systems and Management Accountants and the Effect on Decision Quality

Traditionally, management accountants provide managers with reports containing some predefined KPIs and other KPIs requested by the manager. Today, self-service reporting systems (dashboards) allow managers to request their desired KPIs in addition to some predefined KPIs without any involvement of a management accountant. Using an experiment, we investigate whether managers' KPI selection differs when managers request additional KPIs from self-reporting software versus a management accountant. Based on motivated reasoning, we predict that managers request fewer KPIs that reflect a negative future development from management accountants than from a self-reporting system because they want to be perceived as good decision-makers. We find support for this prediction when decision consequences for others are not salient and identify self-esteem concerns as the main driver of this effect. Making decision consequences for others more salient mitigates this effect. In addition, we find that biased KPI selection leads to lower decision quality