Laurie Burney

Followers

Following

Public Views

Ozyegin University

Royal College of Art

Mansoura University

Technion Israel Institute of Technology

Christina Lindskog

Lund University

Noel Carroll

University of Galway

Glenn Ballard

University of California, Berkeley

Ozlem Er

Istanbul Bilgi University

José Luis Ponz Tienda

Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)

Emmanuel Itodo Daniel

University of Wolverhampton

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Laurie Burney

Balanced Scorecard Internal Process Perspective: Applying Data Analytics to Monitor Police Department Performance

Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting

Employers expect graduates to perform data analytics using both organizational and publicly avail... more Employers expect graduates to perform data analytics using both organizational and publicly available data. Interestingly, few teaching cases provide students with needed exposure to data analytics in managerial or governmental accounting. In this case, students assume the role of a managerial accountant employed at Municipal Consulting, LLC. Students assist the Police Commissioner in using a Balanced Scorecard approach to analyze how her department responds to crime patterns and to develop next year’s budget. This case requires students to critique, analyze, and evaluate Internal Business Process Perspective Balanced Scorecard measures supported by publicly available data using data visualization software. The case includes instructions for both Tableau and Power BI. The case covers three skills: (1) extract, transform, and load data; (2) develop data visualization software experience; and (3) analyze data. The case is designed for senior level undergraduate and graduate courses in...

The influence of organizational values on employee attitude and information security behavior: the mediating role of psychological capital

Information & Computer Security

Purpose With increased remote working, employers are concerned with employees’ commitment and com... more Purpose With increased remote working, employers are concerned with employees’ commitment and compliance with security procedures. Through the lens of psychological capital, this study aims to investigate whether strong organizational values can improve employees’ commitment to the organization and security behaviors. Design/methodology/approach Using Qualtrics platform, the authors conducted an online survey. The survey participants are college-educated, full-time employees. The authors used structural equation modeling to analyze 289 responses. Findings The results indicate perceived importance of organizational values is associated with increased organizational commitment and information security behavior. The authors find that psychological capital partially mediates these relations suggesting that employees’ psychological capital effectively directs employees toward an affinity for the organization and information security behavior. The results highlight the importance of organ...

The Usefulness of the Two-Step Normality Transformation in Retesting Existing Theories

ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems

The Two-Step normality transformation has been shown to reliably transform continuous variables t... more The Two-Step normality transformation has been shown to reliably transform continuous variables toward normality. The procedure offers researchers a capable alternative to more prominent methods, such as winsorization, ranking, and power transformations. We demonstrate its utility in the context of the Productivity Paradox literature stream, which is renowned for inconsistent results. This paper demonstrates that the Two-Step normality transformation, which has not been used in Productivity Paradox research, may produce greater goodness-of-fit and affect theoretical understandings on the topic. We use a classic Productivity Paradox dataset to show that compared to the prominent normality transformations, the Two-Step produces unique findings, including 1) regression coefficients more closely resembling the original data, 2) different effect sizes and significance levels, and 3) strengthening evidence for fundamental theories in Productivity Paradox literature. We demonstrate results...

Ten Misunderstandings about the Two Step Transformation to Normal: A Response to Criticism

Download

Advancing Accounting Research of Teaching Efficacy: Developing a Scale to Measure Student Attitudes toward Active Learning Experiences

Literature consistently documents a positive, direct effect of students’ attitudes on learning (L... more Literature consistently documents a positive, direct effect of students’ attitudes on learning (Lizzio, Wilson, & Simons, 2002). Hence, accounting studies describing active learning activities often report student attitudes as evidence of efficacy (e.g., Matherly & Burney, 2013), but rely on single-item instead of multi-item scales. This practice in accounting impedes evaluation of active learning activities or testing of empirical models. Thus, we (1) develop scales capturing students’ attitudes, (2) use qualitative inquiry to validate our scales, and (3) empirically test our scales using Biggs’ (1989) 3P Model. These scales will enable this stream to mature through more consistent constructs and sophisticated modeling.

Download

The Impact of an SPMS on Employee Outcomes and Store Performance in a Retail Environment

A Methodology for Developing Normalized Formative Indices Using Messy Data

The global expansion of information technology is providing MIS researchers greater accessibility... more The global expansion of information technology is providing MIS researchers greater accessibility to secondary data sources than ever before. Unfortunately, practically all of the variables in this era of Big Data are non-normally distributed and many have large proportions of missing values. In many cases, extreme distributional problems such as inflated frequencies (e.g., stacks of zeroes) inhibit statistical analyses for data mining or theory testing purposes. Because of the massive amounts of available ‘messy’ data, practitioners and researchers need methods for prioritizing and analyzing their archival datasets. Thus, we propose a normalized formative index development methodology that progresses through five stages: content specification, data collection, data reduction, technical validation and norming. Each stage of the proposed methodology is validated by its successful use in multidisciplinary research on formative index construction.

Balanced Scorecard: A Data Analytics Application to Monitor Police Department Performance

What is Lean Accounting and Why Should I Care?

Using a Two-Step Transformation to Address Non-Normality from a Business Value of Information Technology Perspective

Journal of Information Systems, 2017

ABSTRACTAccounting information systems (AIS) research data may suffer from severe non-normality, ... more ABSTRACTAccounting information systems (AIS) research data may suffer from severe non-normality, which, if not handled properly, may lead to incorrect statistical inferences. To address this problem, we empirically evaluate the relative merits of a Two-Step normality transformation proposed by Templeton (2011) compared to four alternative distributions available to researchers (random-normal, original, natural log transformed, and winsorization transformed). Using 45 corporate financial performance ratios (CFP), we investigated three perspectives on measurement validity: construct validity, reliability, and difference testing. We then examined the efficacy of the Two-Step method in the context of business value of IT research—we regressed four IT investment and three control variables on 31 of theoretically relevant CFP indicators. The preponderance of our evidence shows that the Two-Step method consistently outperforms the prominently used alternatives in achieving statistical norm...

Download

The Intersection of “Bad Apples,” “Bad Barrels,” and the Enabling Use of Performance Measurement Systems

Journal of Information Systems, 2017

A performance measurement system (PMS) consists of data transformed into performance measures, wh... more A performance measurement system (PMS) consists of data transformed into performance measures, which is used to control operations and employee behavior. As such, a PMS is embedded within the broader accounting information system (AIS). Existing literature suggests organizations benefit from using a PMS in a way that employees perceive enables them to better perform their job tasks. However, those benefits may not always be realized depending on individual and unit-level ethical characteristics that interact with the use of AIS. The purpose of this study is to examine the intersection of AIS and business ethics by focusing on how a specific type of AIS is used; namely, the PMS. We integrate the extent of perceived amoral manipulation and the ethical work climate with the extent to which the PMS is perceived to be enabling. We document instances when the enabling use of a PMS is not always beneficial, offer implications for organizations in terms of managing the level of counterprodu...

The Relationship Between Balanced Scorecard Characteristics and Managers' Job Satisfaction

Journal of Managerial Issues, 2010

A primary tenet of principal-agency theory is that firms must delegate decisionmaking to managers... more A primary tenet of principal-agency theory is that firms must delegate decisionmaking to managers. However, the manager's actions are seldom directly observable by the firm. Therefore, firms develop performance measurement (PM) systems to not only evaluate performance, but to help align managerial actions with the goals of the firm. Traditionally, however, these systems have extensively relied on financial measures, which provide incentives for managers to make decisions that focus on short-run performance (Butler et al., 1997; Kaplan and Norton, 1996). This short-run emphasis has been an ongoing concern in the management accounting literature (for example, Eldenburg and Wolcott, 2005). To help mitigate this short-term focus, Kaplan and Norton (KN) (1992, 1996) proposed an alternative PM system, the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). Successful implementations of the BSC have been reported by management accounting practitioners (for example, Bitchard, 1996; Lyons and Gumbus, 2004; Nankervis, 2006). Several preliminary empirical studies have addressed BSC issues. For example, Lipe and Salterio (2000) find that managers rely more on common (i.e., measures that are the same across different divisions) versus unique performance measures (i.e., measures distinctive to a particular division). Then, Libby, Salterio and Webb (2004) show that accountability mitigates this focus on common measures. Lipe and Salterio (2002) establish that the use of the BSC results in different evaluations of performance than when relying on alternative systems. Other studies have demonstrated that managers fail to understand the cause and effect relationships inherent in the BSC concept (i.e., Banker et al., 2004; Malina and Selto, 2001). Burney and Matherly (2007) provide evidence that the comprehensiveness of the PM system is associated with employee outcomes through the availability of job-relevant information. Job-relevant information and role stress are found to mediate the relation between the extent to which the PM system is linked to organizational strategy and employee performance (Burney and Widener, 2007). It is generally recognized that a primary goal of PM systems is to promote goal congruence and influence managers' behavior (Otley, 1999). Thus, understanding the impact that PM systems such as the BSC have on managers' action choices is integral to the development of systems that will effectively attain organizational goals. Given the importance of PM systems' influence on managers' behaviors, additional research about BSC issues is needed. This study, based on survey data collected from accounting managers in BSC firms, focuses on the BSC's effect on an individual manager's job satisfaction and increases understanding of the BSC's effectiveness within firms. Specifically, this study extends the BSC research by investigating whether two BSC characteristics--the perspective framework and the strategy link--influence managers' behavior. First, results from this study show a strong, positive relation between job satisfaction and managers' perceptions of the strength of the linkage between performance measures and organizational strategy. Perhaps managers who use a BSC that establishes a strong connection with strategy are better informed about the actions desired by the organization and thus face less ambiguity at work. As a result, the managers would experience higher levels of job satisfaction. Second, this study finds that the inclusion of non-financial measures in some BSC categories is positively related to managers' job satisfaction and, therefore, may encourage a long-term decision-making focus. Another contribution of this study is the development of a decision rule to be used when applying survey methodology that allows the researcher to identify organizations that use a BSC. The next section describes the BSC characteristics in this study and reviews the relevant literature. Then, job satisfaction is described and the formal hypotheses are presented. …

Is a Balanced Scorecard Useful in a Competitive Retail Environment?

Management Accounting Quarterly, Sep 22, 2010

To be successful in a competitive environment, organizations must pursue and execute strategies c... more To be successful in a competitive environment, organizations must pursue and execute strategies consistent with their mission. Management needs to align its goals and objectives with those of the organization to execute strategies effectively. With this alignment, managers are motivated to attain higher levels of individual performance. Using a balanced scorecard (BSC) system is an integral component in these alignment efforts. It is also necessary for the company's results to improve with the use of the BSC, and, in the case of a profit-seeking firm, the BSC should be associated with improved financial performance. understanding managers' perceptions and attitudes toward the BSC is an important contribution to the literature. Our study expands and further develops the empirical performance measurement literature by examining managers' attitudes toward the BSC and their perceptions of its usefulness. We also examine the association of the scores with both managerial attitudes and financial performance. Our results are of particular interest because respondents' perceptions and attitudes regarding the BSC differ across management levels, managerial satisfaction is associated with higher scores, and these higher scores are associated with higher levels of financial performance. Our results also indicate that upper-level managers perceive greater improvement in individual, store, and company performance, while unit-level managers perceive higher levels of functionality in areas such as accuracy and reliability. Since Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton's seminal article ("The Balanced Scorecard--Measures that Drive Performance," Harvard Business Review, January/ February 1992), BSCs have been at the forefront of professional management accounting innovations. Two related offshoots of the BSC are strategic performance measurement systems and key performance indicator (KPi) systems that incorporate nonfinancial and financial measures linked to organizational strategy. Therefore, other studies that report the impacts of these systems are referenced as BSCs in this study. A key innovation of BSCs is multiple, strategically linked measures that improve business performance, as opposed to traditional systems that focus primarily on financial metrics. Combining nonfinancial (nontraditional) and financial (traditional) measures enables a company to evaluate performance and, theoretically, improve employee/manager satisfaction, production efficiency, customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, long-term financial performance. Prior literature suggests that for a BSC to produce optimal performance, a number of factors must be part of the system. Our study focuses on two factors: information usefulness and managers' support of the system. Employees must feel that the system provides useful information. Theresa Libby, Steven Salterio, and Alan Webb found that improving the perceived quality of performance measures increased managers' reliance on those measures. (1) if managers perceive that measures lack quality, their attitudes toward the system and support for its use is negatively affected, and they will not incorporate the information into their decision making. (2) Consequently, the organization will not obtain the benefits expected from the BSC. Our study examined whether the characteristics of a BSC do indeed impact managers' attitudes, organizational functioning, and financial performance. We administered an Internet-based survey to store-, district-, and regional-level managers of Wildcat, Inc., a retailer. (3) Wildcat's management was highly supportive of this project, as reflected in the survey's participation rate of more than 72%. Specifically, we used the survey responses to assess managers' attitudes toward the BSC, its benefits, and the impact it has on the organization. We found that Wildcat's managers perceive that the BSC is generally beneficial, and they report a positive attitude toward it. …

Integrating Leadership Experiences into the Accounting Curriculum: Vince Lombardi States That "Leaders Aren't Born, They Are Made." but What Are Accounting Educators Doing to Address This Skill? This Article Describes a Technique for Integrating Practical Leadership Experience into the Accounting...

Management Accounting Quarterly, Sep 22, 2008

VINCE LOMBARDI STATES THAT "LEADERS AREN'T BORN, THEY ARE MADE." BUT WHAT ARE ACCOU... more VINCE LOMBARDI STATES THAT "LEADERS AREN'T BORN, THEY ARE MADE." BUT WHAT ARE ACCOUNTING EDUCATORS DOING TO ADDRESS THIS SKILL? THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES A TECHNIQUE FOR INTEGRATING PRACTICAL LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE INTO THE ACCOUNTING CURRICULUM. In the March 2008 issue of Strategic Finance, Peter Brewer described management accounting as a "leadership-oriented career path" and identified leadership as one of the profession's four pillars.1 The importance of this skill is not new, as calls continue for accounting educators to develop students' soft skills, including communication, teamwork, and leadership. Nevertheless, leadership skills are often overlooked as part of students' academic training. Do faculty assume that students either possess leadership ability or they don't? Warren G. Bennis, a pioneer leadership expert and professor at the University of Southern California and Harvard University, commented on the danger of this premise: "The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born." But what are accounting educators doing to help students learn this skill? Unfortunately, the accounting literature offers little guidance to help faculty incorporate and evaluate leadership. This article helps fill this apparent gap by providing a relatively straightforward strategy for adding practical leadership experiences to the accounting curriculum. We also describe how to assess students' leadership performance and discuss differences in students' perceptions when they are involved in leadership activities. BACKGROUND In response to the many calls for change in accounting education, we redesigned our junior-level undergraduate cost accounting course. The revamped course represents a shift from a traditional lecture orientation to a more competency-focused, active-learning, managerial cost accounting environment. As part of the courseplanning process, we surveyed participants attending the Educators' Roundtable at a recent Institute of Management Accountants (IMA®) Annual Conference. The practitioners' input helped us select the following competencies to emphasize in the revised course- leadership, teamwork, oral and written communication, and technology skills. In this article, we describe our efforts to add leadership-related activities to the class. LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE A multifaceted concept, leadership can be defined in a variety of ways. In a recent article, Robert J. Kramer attempts to summarize the concept of leadership into a succinct definition.2 He describes leadership as a process involving the interactions among the leader and group members where the leader influences the group to attain organizational goals. How can faculty help students acquire leadership skills? According to Sir Antony Jay, author of the classic management book, Management & Machiavelli: A Prescription for Success in Your Business, "The only real training for leadership is leadership." To allow students to practice their leadership skills, we introduce an individual leadership experience as an extension of group projects. The groups consist of three randomly assigned students and generally remain intact throughout the semester. These faculty-assigned teams require students to work with individuals they may not know and who have different backgrounds. Random assignment also forms groups of students who possess varying degrees of ability and skills and often results in conflicting schedules. Consequently, students are more likely to engage their leadership and team-building skills because they are prevented from creating groups with their friends or usual work team. Thus, we believe these predefined groups parallel the real world where employees are assigned to teams so they can complete short-term tasks. …

Increasing the competency focus using a project-driven strategy

Advances in Accounting Education, 2010

ABSTRACT Accounting educators continue to look for efficient ways to introduce personal competenc... more

The Effects of Perceptions of Performance Measurement Characteristics on the Workforce

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

The strategic performance measurement system (SPMS) is a useful tool for communicating valuable i... more The strategic performance measurement system (SPMS) is a useful tool for communicating valuable information to an organization’s most important resource, its human capital (Taylor 2007). This study merges SPMS literature with an important lever of organizational success—its human capital, and investigates how self-efficacy, psychological contracts, and exchange ideology can explain when and why characteristics of SPMSs matter. Using survey data collected in the field, we analyze data on 306 employees of a financial services firm. Our results provide support that self-efficacy and psychological contracts mediate the relation between perceptions of SPMS characteristics and organizational justice. Furthermore, we find that the relation between both SPMS characteristics and procedural justice depend on exchange ideology. These results have both theoretical implications in terms of integrating psychological literature with organizational theory and practical implications in terms of extracting benefits from a costly managerial tool.

Do Characteristics of Strategic Performance Measurement Systems Used in Incentives Enhance Organizational Fairness?

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2006

Economic theory suggests that multiple financial and non-financial measures (i.e., a strategic pe... more Economic theory suggests that multiple financial and non-financial measures (i.e., a strategic performance measurement "SPMS") be used in compensation contracting to properly direct employees' attention and motivate behavior aligned with organizational goals. On the other hand, linking incentives to the SPMS can result in various dysfunctional behaviors, including game playing by employees, the achievement of unbalanced performance, and the potential of basing compensation on an incomplete performance measurement system. Prior literature has investigated the use of subjectivity in compensation contracting as a means of potentially mitigating these problems; however, subjectivity can introduce other problems including claims of favoritism and bias. Economic theorists have recently begun expanding the traditional agency model to include the notion of fairness or justice. In this study, we obtain data from an organization that uses an SPMS as the basis for the allocation of bonuses and investigate whether perceived organizational fairness is associated with the SPMS. Specifically, we hypothesize and show that the extent to which the SPMS reflects a strategic causal model and the degree to which it is technically valid are associated with higher perceptions of organizational justice. We also provide evidence that heightened levels of organizational justice are the mechanism though which the characteristics of the SPMS are associated with employee performance. The implication is that firms do not necessarily need to introduce subjectivity into the incentive contracting system, but can enhance performance by linking incentive contracts to their SPMS if they design the system so as to enhance perceptions of justice.

Examining Performance Measurement from an Integrated Perspective

Journal of Information Systems, 2007

This paper introduces system comprehensiveness, a variable reflecting the diversity of performanc... more This paper introduces system comprehensiveness, a variable reflecting the diversity of performance measurement (PM) categories captured in a PM system. Using this variable, we synthesize the information systems and management accounting literatures into an integrated model of PM systems. Based on survey responses from 646 experienced financial managers, our integrated model results provide evidence that system comprehensiveness partially explains how participation leads to job-relevant information. Furthermore, our findings indicate that system comprehensiveness is associated with employee outcomes through the mediating effect of jobrelevant information. These results suggest that organizations benefit from PM systems that incorporate a broader set of measures. Also, by linking the two research streams, this paper provides a richer understanding of how participation improves employee outcomes. Along this line, we identify a variety of future research opportunities that, if approache...

Download

Do non-profit hospitals provide more charity care when faced with a mandatory minimum standard? Evidence from Texas

Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, 2010

increased by NFPs providing too little charity care prior to the law, this group represents less ... more increased by NFPs providing too little charity care prior to the law, this group represents less than 20% of our sample. These findings are particularly important given the increase in Texas uninsurance rates during the sample period. Seventeen states have followed Texas' lead by enacting legislation regarding the charity care spending by NFPs, thus an empirical investigation into the impact of this precedent-setting legislation is critical for evaluating the effectiveness of specific charity care requirements.

Download

Active Learning Activities to Revitalize Managerial Accounting Principles

Issues in Accounting Education, 2013

ABSTRACT:Students often enroll in the managerial principles class because of a degree requirement... more ABSTRACT:Students often enroll in the managerial principles class because of a degree requirement rather than a burning passion to learn the subject matter. Through active learning, new content can become more interesting by involving students in their own learning. This paper offers accounting faculty four active learning activities to engage students and enhance their understanding of difficult concepts: managerial accounting terminology, activity-based costing, variance analysis, and special order decision-making. During these in-class activities, students work through relevant computations and delve into additional considerations using guided class discussions. A survey of students' attitudes reveals that students perceive that these active learning activities had a positive impact on their content knowledge related to the managerial principles course, as well as their attitude toward and interest in the class. In addition, students felt that the activities were worthwhile a...

Balanced Scorecard Internal Process Perspective: Applying Data Analytics to Monitor Police Department Performance

Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting

The influence of organizational values on employee attitude and information security behavior: the mediating role of psychological capital

Information & Computer Security

The Usefulness of the Two-Step Normality Transformation in Retesting Existing Theories

ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems

Ten Misunderstandings about the Two Step Transformation to Normal: A Response to Criticism

Download

Advancing Accounting Research of Teaching Efficacy: Developing a Scale to Measure Student Attitudes toward Active Learning Experiences

Download

The Impact of an SPMS on Employee Outcomes and Store Performance in a Retail Environment

A Methodology for Developing Normalized Formative Indices Using Messy Data

Balanced Scorecard: A Data Analytics Application to Monitor Police Department Performance

What is Lean Accounting and Why Should I Care?

Using a Two-Step Transformation to Address Non-Normality from a Business Value of Information Technology Perspective

Journal of Information Systems, 2017

Download

The Intersection of “Bad Apples,” “Bad Barrels,” and the Enabling Use of Performance Measurement Systems

Journal of Information Systems, 2017

The Relationship Between Balanced Scorecard Characteristics and Managers' Job Satisfaction

Journal of Managerial Issues, 2010

Is a Balanced Scorecard Useful in a Competitive Retail Environment?

Management Accounting Quarterly, Sep 22, 2010

Management Accounting Quarterly, Sep 22, 2008

Increasing the competency focus using a project-driven strategy

Advances in Accounting Education, 2010

ABSTRACT Accounting educators continue to look for efficient ways to introduce personal competenc... more

The Effects of Perceptions of Performance Measurement Characteristics on the Workforce

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

Do Characteristics of Strategic Performance Measurement Systems Used in Incentives Enhance Organizational Fairness?

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2006

Examining Performance Measurement from an Integrated Perspective

Journal of Information Systems, 2007

Download

Do non-profit hospitals provide more charity care when faced with a mandatory minimum standard? Evidence from Texas

Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, 2010

Download

Active Learning Activities to Revitalize Managerial Accounting Principles

Issues in Accounting Education, 2013

Laurie Burney

Related Authors

Uploads

Papers by Laurie Burney

Log In