Change in the Management Accountant ’ s Role : Drivers and Diversity

“Management accounting change” has been used to express a paradigmatic shift in expectations of the management accountant, encompassing two types of development: the adoption in practice of new tools and techniques, often with some academic provenance, and a practitioner-led movement towards a new role type in which the accountant acts more in an advisory capacity, integral to managerial decision-making, rather than solely as a provider of information. This latter form of change has attracted less academic attention and there is a paucity of evidence as to the current extent of change as well as the relative influence of suggested drivers of change, variations in which could result in a greater diversity in practice across organisations than is portrayed in the practitioner literature. These gaps in the literature may be attributed in large part to a lack of current, broad-scale data on the activities of management accountants, which we seek to remedy in this study through the use of data on the importance of 27 activities/issue in which management accountants are involved, drawn from an international survey of the membership of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) in 2007 with over 4 600 responses. Given the sample size and its diversity in terms of the types of organisations represented, it is possible to both assess the extent of role change and test for observable effects of the suggested drivers. On the basis of factor analysis, we identify six role types for the management accountant, one of which clearly embodies activities/issues which have been suggested as indicative of the new role type, thus providing empirical evidence for that characterisation. However, at the aggregate level, the ranking of activities/issues associated with this new role type is found to be highly mixed and dominated by others associated with more traditional roles, which we interpret in terms of role change being an evolutionary process with specific activities becoming more important at varying rates. Furthermore, by comparison to results from a similar survey conducted five years previously, we observe a degree of inertia which suggests that the process of change is taking considerably longer than predicted in earlier studies. Applying both contingency and institutional theories to analyse the suggested drivers of role change, we identify variables representing pressures for change, the relative strengths of which are hypothesised to account for diversity in responses within the sample. These hypotheses are tested using ordered logistic regressions to model the relationship with the categorical measure of activity/issue importance, which show that organisational size is a more powerful predictor than measures of economic globalisation and sectoral competitiveness. We interpret this finding in terms of size as a proxy measure for causative factors (isomorphic pressure and operational complexity) and the enabling factor of resource availability (e.g. to support retraining and restructuring) but on the evidence here do not reject the hypotheses that globalisation and competition play a role in driving role change. We also identify strong effects associated with the respondent’s functional attachment and their seniority, in that those working outside the finance function and/or in more senior roles ascribe much greater importance to activities/issues associated with the new role type and less to those associated with traditional roles, suggesting that diversity in the uptake of the new role type is associated with personal, as well as organisational, characteristics and that future research should be as sensitive to diversity within organisations as between them.