Organizations increasingly promote individual creativity as a strategy to manage their performance and financial strain. Drawing on self-regulation and goal-setting theories, this study examines whether the diagnostic use of budgets stifles or stimulates managers’ creativity directly or indirectly through frugal spending behaviour and perceived goal clarity. Budgetary controls and frugal spending behaviour—with the focus on conserving resources and constraining spending—have traditionally been suggested as hindering individual creativity. However, by analysing survey data collected from middle-level managers in Indonesia, our findings show that the diagnostic use of budgets increases managers’ frugal spending behaviour which, in turn, enhances their creativity. Furthermore, the diagnostic use of budgets increases managers’ perceived goal clarity, with goal clarity and frugal spending behaviour fully mediating the relationship between the diagnostic use of budgets and creativity. The study contributes to the budgeting literature by showing that diagnostic use of budgets encourages managers’ frugal spending behaviour to effectively manage organisational costs and stimulate their creativity.

The integration of risk into management control has recently received increased attention in the management accounting and control literature. Much of this research has focused on the organizational and individual actor level. However, some studies suggest that the integration of risk into the organizational control package may equally be influenced by forces operating at other levels of analysis– including the economic and political level and the organizational field level. In this guest editorial for the special issue on “Courageous Risk Governance: Enabling Resilience, Autonomy, and New Thinking,” I therefore discuss how our collective understanding of the integration of risk into management control could be enhanced by research at multiple levels of analysis. The papers included in this special issue show that when this integration is successfully managed, organizations can achieve valuable outcomes, such as increased resilience. For both practitioners and academics, future research on such integration therefore seems fruitful and necessary. This article provides ideas for particularly relevant questions about this integration and for theories that can guide such research.

Risk managers as corporate stewards are important gatekeepers in enterprises and they are essential to managing risks. Relatedly, a more accurate evaluation of the risk factors allows a well-founded decision-making process and reduces the number of surprising situations that could occur especially in volatile markets. Forward-looking risk management increases entrepreneurial resilience because risk factors are already estimated at an earlier stage in the corresponding risk analysis. Furthermore, the range of potential solutions can be estimated in a successive way. These aspects are relevant especially for products with follow-up effects. Such new product bundles are typical in current businesses. They require a more precise risk analysis, which allows an effective view of the life-cycles of the whole products and the customer relationships. Within well-founded risk decomposition, the existing risk can be managed appropriately. The following study presents a special life-cycle approach for evaluating products and customers in risky situations. Especially for important management decisions, such an approach is necessary, given that only a few products or customers can have a major influence on the success of the enterprise. Therefore, a systematic risk-oriented approach is essential that adequately identifies, assesses and controls the risk factors and enables agile adaptability for fast changes. Considering the risk management perspective, simulation techniques are a useful approach to solve sophisticated decision situations. The applicability of this concept is demonstrated using a computation example reflecting real-world circumstances. The presented approach is broadly defined. That is the reason why the approach can also be transferred to other sectors.

Contributions to the family firm literature have given attention to different challenges that family firms have to face in their life cycle when organisational complexity increases and managerial processes are required. This paper investigates how management accounting (MA) tools enable family and managerial views of doing business to complement each other during the professionalisation process. In particular, the paper discusses a longitudinal case study on a family firm’s professionalisation, when an external advisor introduced financial ratio analysis and contribution margin reports. The case evidence shows that MA tools, by facilitating communication amongst family firm members and the external advisor, favours the complementing between family firm and managerial views of doing business during the professionalisation process. When simultaneously trusting family firm and managerial views of doing business, family firm members had the chance to interpret business facts differently, discovering new business opportunities. The paper contributes to the family business literature examining the professionalisation process through the pragmatic constructivist (PC) perspective that analyses the main traits of family firm and managerial views of doing business, stressing the relevance of values in interpreting business facts and in identifying factual possibilities. On this issue, the PC perspective is useful in understanding the role of MA tools as a communication basis for enabling the complementing of different views of doing business during the professionalisation process.

This study examines the mediating role of Simons’ (Levers of control: How managers use innovative control systems to drive strategic renewal, Harvard Business School Press, 1995) levers of control (belief systems, boundary controls, interactive use of controls, diagnostic use of controls) on the association between sustainable leadership and organisational resilience. Data was collected using a mail survey of 410 Australian middle level managers. The results reveal that three of the levers of control (belief systems, interactive use of controls, and diagnostic use of controls) mediate the influence of sustainable leadership on organisational resilience, with sustainable leadership exhibiting both a direct and indirect (through the levers) influence on organisational resilience. The findings contribute to the organisational resilience literature by providing an insight into the crucial role of the levers of control in facilitating the effectiveness of the sustainable leadership approach i.e. through enhancing organisational resilience. Accordingly, managers are advised to enhance organisational resilience through employing a sustainable leadership approach and employing belief systems and the interactive and diagnostic use of controls.