Faced with greater environmental uncertainty, firms have sought to attain competitive advantage through a greater emphasis on business strategy and strategic approach to the use of budget system. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of ...
Faced with greater environmental uncertainty, firms have sought to attain competitive advantage through a greater emphasis on business strategy and strategic approach to the use of budget system. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of business strategy on the use of budget system, the effects of the use of budget system on budgetary slack creation, managerial short-term orientation and organizational performance, and the effects of fit between business strategy and the use of budget system on these dependent variables. In this study, Porter's(1980) cost leadership/differentiation classification was used to construct business strategy, and Simons'(1995) diagnostic/interactive classification was used to construct the use of budget system. Empirical analyses were performed on the data from a survey of 130 business unit executives of manufacturing firms listed in the Korea Stock Exchange, and the results are as follows:
The use of budget system is influenced by business strategy. Diagnostic use was more prevalent in firms that actively pursued cost leadership while firms that pursued differentiation strategy tended to use more interactive use of budget system.
Pursuing diagnostic use had positive effects on both financial and non-financial performance while it had no significant effects on budgetary slack creation and managerial short-term orientation. This suggests that two type of so-called dysfunctional behaviors of budget could not be controlled by the diagnostic use of budget system. On the contrary, pursuing interactive use not only reduced budgetary slack and managerial short-term orientation but also improved both financial and non-financial performance.
Firms that pursued a higher fit between cost leadership strategy and diagnostic use of budget system were found to create less budgetary slack and higher financial and non-financial performance than firms that did not. Also, firms that pursued a higher fit between differentiation strategy and interactive use of budget system exhibited lower managerial short-term orientation and higher financial and non-financial performance than firms that did not.
According to the results of this study, the diagnostic use of budget system has limitations in controlling dysfunctional behaviors such as budgetary slack creation and managerial short-term orientation. It is thus another style of budget system use namely, the interactive use of budget system be adopted to control dysfunctional behaviors of budget and respond better to the recent changes in the business environments. It is also stressed that the fit between business strategy and the use of budget system is the key to reducing the dysfunctional behaviors of budget as well as increasing organizational performance.