Research

Publications

Strategic Alignment, Performance, and the Moderating Effect of Regulatory Fit

With Steve Smith and Travis Steadman. (2025). Journal of Management Accounting Research 37 (1): 111-126.

We examine how the alignment of performance measurement and strategy affects performance on a multidimensional task. Our experiment varies both the strategy (speed versus accuracy) of the hypothetical firm for which participants work and the individual performance measure that is reported to them, creating two conditions of clear alignment and two of clear misalignment. We find that although workers are responsive to the performance measure regardless of its alignment, they are also sensitive to the strategy such that costly alignment effects are observed. We also predict and find that workers respond asymmetrically to misalignment in accuracy performance but not in speed performance, demonstrating that the effects of misaligned performance measurement depend on the fit between firm strategy and the nature of the task being performed.

Working Papers

Un-Nudging Pay Gaps: The Role of Pay Raise Budget Framing

With Karl Schuhmacher and Kristy Towry. Conditionally accepted at The Accounting Review.

Pay gaps, like gender or racial gaps, violate the widely held belief that employees should receive equal pay for equal work. This study examines whether a common control choice – framing pay raise budgets in percentages – contributes to perpetuating pay gaps. We predict that when the pay raise budget is framed as a percentage (the percentage frame), it inadvertently nudges managers to anchor individual raises on that budget percentage, thereby impounding prior salaries, and thus, existing inequities, into pay raises. We further predict that framing the pay raise budget as an absolute amount (the dollar frame) can un-nudge this behavior. As expected, we find in two experiments that the dollar frame perpetuates pay gaps less than the percentage frame, and that this difference is robust to varying levels of ambiguity about the source of salary differences. Our study examines a simple, cost-effective way to limit the perpetuation of pay gaps.

Timing is Everything: Congruence, Controllability, and Performance Measure Weighting

With Gary Hecht, Bill Tayler, and Kristy Towry. Revising for resubmission to The Accounting Review.

We investigate whether the weights managers place on performance measures for performance-based compensation depend on whether weights are determined at the beginning or end of the performance period. We propose that managers frame the weighting decision differently depending on timing. Specifically, prior to employee effort, managers frame the decision as intended to align employee effort to firm objectives, whereas after employees have exerted effort, managers frame the weighting decision as intended to evaluate employee effort. Thus, we expect, and find, that managers weight measures that are more congruent with firm objectives more heavily when weightings are determined ex ante (before employee effort) and weight measures that are more controllable more heavily when weightings are determined ex post. Further, we find that this effect of timing is robust to the availability and valence of outcome information, which is often readily available in ex post measure weighting scenarios. Ultimately, our study speaks to the unexplored – but fundamental – effect of timing on managers’ performance measure weighting choices. While managerial accounting literature largely views timing as an assumption or an artifact of context, timing is often an important choice that has profound implications for the structure of performance evaluation and compensation systems.

Labor Market Competition and Measure Weighting in Job Promotion Decisions

Solo authored.

Prior research explores how managers weight measures of performance and potential in job promotion decisions. In this study, I investigate the effect of the labor market on these measure weights. I expect labor market competition to increase the salience of potential employee departures and, consequently, managers’ focus on retention. Drawing on theory of loss aversion, I predict that managers will try to retain high performers by overweighting measures of performance, relative to measures of potential, in job promotion decisions. I also predict that this effect can be mitigated by requiring managers to explicitly, rather than implicitly, weight measures used in promotion decisions. Experimental results support these predictions but highlight other potential consequences of using explicit weighting. This study extends prior literature by demonstrating how external labor market conditions can influence internal labor decisions. Ultimately, the findings suggest that labor market competition may increase the likelihood of suboptimal promotion decisions.

Research in Progress

• "Autism and Incentives" with Karen Sedatole, Mikle South, and Kristy Towry

• "Human Capital Accounting" with Myrna Modolon Lima and Karen Sedatole

• "Experimental Participants" with Christian Peters

• "Status and Promotions" with Kyle Broderick