Journal article
Group Identity, Performance Transparency, and Employee Performance
Ruidi Shang, Margaret Abernethy, Chung-Yu Hung
The Accounting Review | American Accounting Association | Published : 2020
DOI: 10.2308/accr-52652
Abstract
Economics, social psychology, and management studies suggest that group identity plays an important role in directing employee behaviors. On the one hand, strong group identity could motivate high effort by resolving conflicts of interests in the workplace. On the other hand, it could encourage conformity towards group norms. We examine whether the effect of group identity is conditional on managers' performance reporting choices. Drawing on survey and archival data from a field site, we find that when performance transparency is low, the interest alignment effect is more salient and group identity positively relates to employee performance. However, when performance transparency is high, th..
View full abstractGrants
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Michael G. Williamson (editor) and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also thank Shannon Anderson, Eddy Cardinaels, Dennis Campbell, Tatiana Sandino, Sally Widener, and seminar participants at Harvard Business School, Tilburg University, The University of Melbourne, the 2017 Global Management Accounting Research Symposium (GMARS), and the 2018 Management Accounting Section (MAS) Midyear Meeting for their constructive feedback. We thank the company in this study for providing us with data. We acknowledge the financial support of the Accounting Department in The University of Melbourne.