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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether trust and distrust in upper-level managers exert different influences on the budgetary proposals of middle managers. Such proposals involve different levels of managerial effort that impact overall budgetary slack.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on a laboratory experiment with 160 business managers.FindingsThe results show that the more (less) middle managers trust (distrust) their upper-level managers, the more (the less) effort they commit to budgetary proposals. The authors also find that middle managers with low trust are prone to invest more effort and thus create less budgetary slack than managers with high distrust. The results also show that the introduction of suspicion does not vary this initial choice of effort and budgetary slack.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper shows the importance of trust and distrust as informal control systems in organizations. The findings support the importance of extrinsic motivation for enhancing effort and reducing budgetary slack. There are a wide range of exogenous variables that have an effect on the development of trust and distrust.Practical implicationsPractitioners may improve their management control by facilitating trust and preventing distrust in interpersonal relationships because both are informal controls that can reduce and increase, respectively, dysfunctional behaviors in organizations, such as budgetary slack.Originality/valueThis paper is among the first to show the distinct effects of trust and distrust (high and low) in the efforts of middle managers. This study provides a dynamic viewpoint of trust through the introduction of suspicion in a budget negotiation.

This study analyzes how Management Accounting and Control Systems (MACS) facilitate the appropriation of the benefits of sustainable innovations in organizations. In particular, this paper examines the moderating role of different types of MACS in the relationships between sustainable innovation and international performance at an organizational level. We collected survey data from 123 Spanish and Portuguese organizations. Partial Least Square was used to analyze the data. Results show that the effect of sustainable innovations on international performance is enhanced by contemporary rather than traditional types of MACS. Overall our findings show that MACS can help managers to develop and monitor organizational activities (e.g., costumer services and distribution activities), which support the appropriation of the potential benefits from sustainable innovation. This paper responds to recent calls for in-depth studies about the organizational mechanism that may enhance the success of sustainable innovation. ; This study used the database developed within the REAL Project framework [0149_REAL_1_P]. This project was 75% co-financed by the European Union through POCTEP (operational program for cross-border cooperation Spain-Portugal 2007–2013).

AbstractThis paper studies the determinants of financial performance (return on assets, ROA) of 18 Argentine Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) from 2002 to 2018. We apply the random forest algorithm to predict the ROA of the Argentine MFIs, introducing two social variables to capture the depth of the outreach such as the female ratio and the average size of the loan portfolio divided by the GDP per capita. We also consider five other main explanatory variables, such as the size, efficiency, quality of loan portfolio, solvency, and productivity ratio, as well as macroeconomic variables. Although our results indicate that the quality of the loan portfolio and efficiency are the most important variables in predicting ROA, we find that social variables are also important; in particular, the female ratio, which is the third relevant predictor of ROA. In contrast, macroeconomic variables and the financial crisis turn out to be insignificant in our analysis.