WHAT WE LEARNED
Our results indicate that whether budget-gaming or earnings-management actions are ethical is the primary influence on decision makers' ethical judgments as well as on supervisors' intentions to intervene with reprimands or encouragement. Organizational outcomes are also significant. Ethical judgments of subjects and related intentions to intervene become more neutral when unethical actions produce favorable results, and vice versa, as in situations where ethical choices produce poor organizational results. This serves to highlight the ongoing problems organizations face in overcoming ethical conflicts. The finding that the "rightness" of an action dominates organizational outcome suggests that enhancing a firm's ethical culture may reduce incentives to engage in undesirable budgetgaming and earnings-management practices.
What are the implications of our results for accountants and businesses? Organizational characteristics such as an enhanced ethical environment (for example, formal ethics codes, ethics training, and socially responsible behavior), good management role models, and social pressure to reveal truthful information may deter budgetary gaming. Therefore, organizations should care - fully cultivate an ethical atmosphere that is sensitive to the pressures employees may feel to game the budget through actions that involve cheating and/or manipulating earnings targets to maximize bonuses. In this same vein, some suggest that concern for maintaining a favorable reputation leads to lower budgetary slack creation. Other studies imply that management may want to empower employees with greater budgetary responsibility because this also tends to reduce unethical slackcreating behaviors.
Seemingly, the only sure solution to these problems is to eliminate links between accounting measures and employee pay. We suggest that organizational ethics training include role-playing where both executives and rank-and-file employees are encouraged to make the ethically correct decision despite consequences that may be detrimental to the organization.
Management accountants-whether they function as CFOs, controllers, internal auditors, or simply as staffaccountants-and their internal customers need to be sensitive to ethical dilemmas relating to the budget and earnings management. In addition to encouraging the ethical culture we have described, the preponderance of evidence suggests that management should sever the ties between compensation and budgetary/earnings performance. There are other ways to incentivize key employees, such as tying compensation to external metrics such as relative market share or other industryrelated (rather than internally focused) key performance indicators. Otherwise, the presence of unethical behaviors may compromise the reputation of management and the organization, leading to far greater consequences. For management accountants and other financial professionals who are in a position to influence key decision makers, now is the time to face these issues head-on.