Effects of management control mechanisms: towards a more comprehensive analysis

Even though it is widely accepted that management control systems consist of formal (results and/or action controls) and informal mechanisms (personnel and/or cultural controls), empirical research analyzing the effects of these management control mechanisms in a more comprehensive way is still scarce. Based on a cross-sectional survey among 295 senior management accountants, we examine how different management control mechanisms are related to control system effectiveness and organizational commitment and how these two outcomes subsequently affect overall organizational performance. Our results suggest that particularly more informal control mechanisms are strongly associated with beneficial outcomes. Our study contributes to extant literature by identifying distinct relative effects of alternative management control mechanisms on organizational-level outcomes. Overall, our results support the growing relevance of more informal control mechanisms compared to prevailing formal control instruments in contemporary organizations. © 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.