How CFOs Determine Management Accounting Innovation: An Examination of Direct and Indirect Effects

Although management accounting innovations such as Activity-Based Costing, the Balanced Scorecard and benchmarking have received much academic interest in recent years, our understanding of why some organizations adopt and implement such new management accounting systems (MAS) and others do not, is still underdeveloped. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the role of the CFO in MAS innovation. We hypothesize that individual differences between CFOs are predictive of organizations' use of innovative MAS. In addition, we propose that CFO characteristics moderate the extent to which organizations rationally adapt to (environmental) contingencies. To examine this second prediction we compare the effects of strategy and historical performance on the adoption of innovative MAS for organizations with different types of CFOs. We test our hypotheses using a combination of archival and survey data from the public health care sector in Spain. Our results are generally supportive of our hypotheses.