Cognitive style and connotative meaning in management accounting communication

Barbara Weißenberger () and Gero Holthoff ()

Metrika: International Journal for Theoretical and Applied Statistics, 2013, vol. 24, issue 1, 25 pages

Abstract: Successful management accounting communication requires that the parties involved have a mutual understanding of the terms employed. Connotative meaning, i.e., the personal way of seeing and stressing aspects of a term, is an important layer of meaning and, therefore, lacking consent on connotative meaning is a potential impediment to management accounting communication. The theory of linguistic relativity predicts that a person’s cognitive style has an impact on how the connotative meaning of management accounting terms is perceived. In our paper, we assess this link as a possible impediment to successful management accounting communication. We rely on the semantic differential technique to assess the connotative dimensions of selected management accounting terms and use the Cognitive Style Index as an explanatory variable for these connotations. Data for our analysis were gathered from 216 management accounting students with different levels of accounting knowledge. We find empirical evidence that a person’s cognitive style has an impact on the connotative meaning a person associates with management accounting terms. Additionally, we find that connotative meaning is also linked to the level of accounting knowledge. The contribution of our paper is twofold: First, we provide evidence for the link between cognition and connotative meaning in management accounting. Second, our research identifies diverging cognitive styles as a previously overlooked potential source of dysfunctional management accounting communication. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Keywords: Management accounting communication; Accounting as a language; Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; Linguistic relativity; Cognitive style; Connotative meaning; Semantic differential (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00187-013-0172-4 (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:spr:metrik:v:24:y:2013:i:1:p:1-25

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/statistics/journal/184/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00187-013-0172-4

Access Statistics for this article

Metrika: International Journal for Theoretical and Applied Statistics is currently edited by U. Kamps and Norbert Henze

More articles in Metrika: International Journal for Theoretical and Applied Statistics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().