اشتراک گذاری ابتکاری: اطلاعات حسابداری به عنوان یک تسهیل کننده اعتماد و عملکرد مشترک

Creating and maintaining competitive advantage requires firms to foster strategies that encourage and support employees’ efforts. In this paper, I report on a large U.S. firm's innovation to share accounting information with employees. Based on data from 258 employees, I report that shared accounting information impacts workers’ trust in management and performance.

The most successful firms have been innovators of management techniques (Kanter, 1997). One innovative practice is the sharing of accounting information with employees across all organizational levels. The motivation for sharing this information is to encourage employees to think and act like senior stakeholders (e.g., owners, upper management team members, board of directors and shareholders) of the firm rather than as employees without a substantial stake in operational effectiveness and profitability. Organizations that have shared accounting information report increased productivity, profitability and employee involvement (Case, 1995, Case, 1998 and Barton et al., 1998). Although the innovation of sharing accounting information with workers has been practiced by hundreds of companies, relatively little attention has been paid to accounting information sharing by organizational researchers (Davis, 1997). There are at least two ways in which shared accounting information can affect employees: (1) by influencing their attitudes toward the employer such as trust in management, which has been found to increase firm sales and net profit (Davis et al., 2000), and (2) by encouraging workers to become more engaged in the firm's goals and in turn increase their individual performance which will ultimately increase firm effectiveness. The objectives of this paper are to explore the categories of accounting information shared with workers and to understand how sharing various forms of information impact workers’ trust in management and workers’ performance.

The results of this study are consistent with research on the role of a manager, as previous work proposes that a manager should be a disseminator of information to employees (Mintzberg, 1990). The finding that shared accounting information is positively related to workers’ trust in management as well as their individual performance exemplifies the importance of this role.