کنترل ناهمتراز: نقش تقلید سیستم کنترل مدیریت در زنجیره های عرضه Misaligned control: The role of management control system imitation in supply chains

Introduction The design of proper management control systems (MCS) is crucial for the management and performance of interfirm relationships.1 As such, management accounting researchers have devoted considerable effort to explaining firms’ MCS choices in such relationships. Predominantly informed by transaction cost economics (TCE), prior research on interfirm collaborations, and supply chain relations in particular, has considered transaction risk as a key determinant of these choices (Dekker, Sakaguchi, & Kawai, 2013). When engaging in interfirm exchanges, firms may experience a variety of risk factors, such as heightened vulnerability and the potential for transaction partners to opportunistically exploit the dependence relationship (Kang, Wu, Hong, & Park, 2012; Langfield-Smith, 2008). Without appropriate control measures in place to manage these risks, firms may not achieve intended or desired objectives of the relationships they engage in (Anderson, Christ, Dekker, & Sedatole, 2015). The general contention is, then, that transactions with attributes suggesting higher levels of risk, require more extensive use of controls as to foster mutual coordination and collaboration. According to this perspective, MCS design is essentially based on the principle of matching, where firms install MCS that align with the transaction context to mitigate underlying transaction risk. Although this notion of alignment is widely accepted, an organization’s control structure and transaction context may often be out of alignment (Anderson & Dekker, 2015). Specifically, choices that entail either insufficient or excessive use of MCS relative to the transaction risk, represent instances of misaligned control. Despite the fact that such misalignments commonly exist in practice (cf. Handley, 2017), our understanding remains limited as to why misalignment occurs. In this study, we argue that the managerial process of imitating provides a potential explanation for control misalignment.