تاثیرات معیارهای غیرمالی و مالی بر انگیزه کارمند جهت مشارکت در تعیین هدف The effects of nonfinancial and financial measures on employee motivation to participate in target setting

This study focuses on the roles of employee motivation to participate in target setting on the relationships between performance measures and employee job performance. While research on employee budgetary participation was pervasive in the 1980s, the importance of performance measures on the different aspects of employee participation has not received much research attention particularly in the context of nonfinancial vis-à-vis financial measures. Some researchers have suggested that issues pertaining to the various aspects of employee participation including employees’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for participation may affect employee attitudes, behaviour and performance (e.g., Covaleski, Evans, Luft & Shields, 2003; Locke & Schweiger, 1979; Shields & Shields, 1998; Wong-On-Wing, Guo, & Lui, 2010). Yet, the roles of this aspect of employee participation, namely, employee motivation to participate in target setting, have largely been overlooked. To date, no studies have investigated the mediating roles of employee motivation to participate in target setting on the relationships between performance measures (financial vis-à-vis nonfinancial) and employee performance. The importance of employee motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic) to perform well in tasks is widely recognized. However, the notion that employee motivation can manifest in different forms is sometimes overlooked in management accounting research. Motivation (both intrinsic and extrinsic) is related to an activity or activities. While performing tasks is an important activity, it is not the only activity at organizations. There are other activities in relation to employee motivation including employee motivation to engage in organizational citizenship behaviours, employee motivation to conform to social norms, and for our research, employee motivation to participate in target setting. The recognition that there are different forms of motivation is important as different motivations are associated with different consequences. Vallerand (1997, p. 327, 329) describes this as the “specificity hypothesis” and explains as follows: “Motivation is particularly important.in large part because it leads to important consequences. Such consequences can.take place at three levels of generality in line with the motivation that produces them.. Thus, outcomes experienced in one specific context should generally result from motivation in that particular context and not from another context. For instance satisfaction toward school should be a function of school motivation and not leisure or interpersonal motivation.contextual motivation in education was a better predictor of educational consequences than either global motivation or contextual motivation on interpersonal relationships.” Hence, while there is an abundance of empirical research evidence on employee motivation to perform well in tasks (Deci & Ryan, 2012; Sansone & Harackiewcz, 2000), research evidence on employee motivation in other activities, particularly employee motivation to participate in target setting, is very spare (Wong-On-Wing et al., 2010). Distinguishing between the effects of employee motivation to participate in target setting from those of employee motivation to perform well in tasks is important as these two types of motivation are conceptually very different and hence may have very different behavioural consequences. Vallerand (1997) suggest that employees’ motivation is different from organizational goals. Organizational goals may include improved employee job performance. In contrast, employee intrinsic and extrinsic motivation may or may not be related to employee job performance. Employee motivation exists when employees have some intrinsic or extrinsic needs to fulfil. For example, employees’ intrinsic needs may include the needs for challenge, the needs to control, the needs to satisfy curiosity and even the needs to fulfil fantasy (Deci, Connell & Ryan, 1989; Malone & Lepper, 1987; Ryan & Deci, 2000a). These needs are not necessarily related to the organizational goal of improved employee job performance. It therefore remains unclear if the empirical evidence from research on employee motivation to perform well in tasks is generalizable to situations where the motivation is employee motivation to participate in target setting, particularly in the management accounting context