业务单元管理者的业绩评价外文翻译.docVIP

Assesing the Performance of Business Unit Managers Msterial Source: Journal of Accounting Research Author: Jan Bouwens Performance measures are expected to provide managers incentives to work towards the accomplishment of rm objectives and to promote co-operation within the rm. As such, theory suggests that the authority of business unit managers and inter dependencies among business units are important determinants of the weights placed on different performance measures. Our main proposition is that accounting return measures, while always informative about the actions of business unit managers, gain particular importance when these managers have more decision-making authority. We take the degree of authority that business unit managers enjoy as a proxy for the impact of managerial actions on the value of resources. We think that accounting return measures receive more weight in periodic assessment, bonus determination, and career decisions related to business unit managers who have more authority. Additional analysis suggests that the use of accounting return measures is more pronounced when managers have more influence on investment decisions, even though the defacto investment authority of the manager does not extend to increasing the investment base and/or is subject to strict spending limits and preapproval requirements. We also show that accounting return measures increase in importance vis-a-vis prot measures as authority increases. We conclude that as authority increases, weight shifts towards measures that not only summarize the actions taken by the business unit manager but also provide incentives for the appropriate use of resources. In contrast, theory is equivocal with respect to the expected association between the level of authority and disaggregated or nonnancial measures of performance. On the one hand, such measures may be informative about the decisions of business units managers with little authority, but these metrics may also be used whe