The Covid-19 pandemic and management controls

Hoa Ho, Christian Hofmann and Nina Schwaiger

Accounting and Business Research, 2023, vol. 53, issue 5, 583-607

Abstract: We examine how firms respond to the Covid-19 pandemic by adjusting their management controls and what the consequences are in terms of firms’ resilience to the crisis. We review literature that deals with the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on business and investigate results from a survey conducted within a large international multi-divisional service firm and the German Business Panel. We find evidence consistent with the claim that the Covid-19 pandemic is associated with a shock to transparency and increased incentive problems. We document firms’ adjustments of their management controls in response to the Covid-19 crisis: Action controls are stronger, result controls are more flexible, and cultural controls are weaker. Regarding firms’ resilience, we provide supportive evidence that more resilient firms face a smaller shock to transparency, adjust their management controls to a smaller extent, and are associated with stronger cultural controls in terms of higher organisational trust.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00014788.2023.2219158 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:acctbr:v:53:y:2023:i:5:p:583-607

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RABR20

DOI: 10.1080/00014788.2023.2219158

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting and Business Research is currently edited by Vivien Beattie

More articles in Accounting and Business Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().