pdf - Nyenrode Business Universiteit
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98 CHAPTER 4. OPPORTUNISM MITIGATION EFFECTIVENESS<br />
items, I proxy for the extent to which the manager can behave opportunistically if he<br />
wanted to instead of whether he actually behaves opportunistically. This distinction is<br />
important because the room that the Management Control System leaves for potential<br />
opportunism indicates the quality of control.<br />
Table 4.2: Items for Room for Managerial Opportunism (Q39)<br />
Item description<br />
Component<br />
loadings<br />
a. Possibility to hide bad performance 0.848<br />
b. Possibility for shirking 0.816<br />
c. Possibility for window dressing 0.806<br />
d. Possibility to adopt pet projects 0.713<br />
Percentage variance explained 63.6%<br />
Cronbach’s alpha 0.805<br />
The questions for RFMO refer to the room for both active and passive forms of opportunism<br />
and include measures of misleading and lying behaviours. These behaviours include consciously<br />
providing effort that is not congruent with the firm’s goals and committing fraud<br />
with accounting figures. RPE potentially restrains both forms of opportunism. Comparing<br />
a manager’s performance with the performance of a peer group provides the manager’s<br />
superior with information about the quality of the manager’s reported performance. This<br />
information reduces the manager’s ability to hide bad performance by using, for example,<br />
excuses about the market conditions under which the performance was realized. Moreover,<br />
unfavourable peer comparisons may indicate goal-incongruent behaviour, such as<br />
the adoption of a pet project. In contrast, a noticeably favourable comparison with peer<br />
performance that is not supported by a convincing explanation may lead the superior to<br />
detect, for example, fraud committed with accounting figures committed by the manager<br />
to increase his compensation.<br />
Statistically, the individual questions combine into one factor. The four questions produce<br />
a single factor with adequate scale reliability. RFMO is calculated by averaging the<br />
scores on all of the items. The mean score on RFMO is 2.64 (St.Dev. 1.21) on a 7-point<br />
Likert-scale, which suggests that, on average, the respondents have limited room to behave<br />
opportunistically under their installed control systems.<br />
RPE use(*) The RPE use measure (labelled ‘RPE-Use’) asks about the extent to which<br />
peer performance functions as a point of reference for evaluating the quality of the agent’s<br />
performance (Q1). The underlying questionnaire items focus on the ex-post nature of performance<br />
evaluation. This measure comprises both explicit coupling of the performance<br />
target to peer performance and more implicit applications of RPE. Implicit applications