BEHAVIORALIMPLICATIONSOFMANAGEMENT ACCOUNTINGINFORMATION Thus far we have emphasized the analytic role played by management accounting information for planning, resource allocation, decision making, acting, monitoring, and improving. Although the role of management accounting information is essential for supporting decisions and solving problems, information is never neutral. The mere act of measuring and informing affects the individuals involved. Afamous study conducted in the 1920s at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company concluded that individuals and groups alter their behavior when they know they are being studied and their performance is being measured. People react when they are being measured. They focus on the variables and behavior being measured and pay less attention to those not being measured. Some people have overstated this effect by declaring, “What gets measured gets done.” More accurately, the expression should be “If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage and improve it,” which can be taken as one of the fundamental rationales for studying and implementing management accounting systems. It is normal, however, as managers introduce or redesign cost and performance measurement systems, for people familiar and comfortable with the previous systems to resist change. These people have acquired expertise in the use (and occasional misuse) of the old system and are concerned about whether their experience and expertise will be transferable to the new system. People also may feel committed to the decisions and actions taken on the basis of information an oldsystem has produced. These actions may no longer seem valid based on the information produced by a newly installed management accounting system. Thus, a new management system can lead to embarrassment and threat, a trigger for reactions against change. The design and introduction of new measurements and systems must be accompanied by an analysis of the behavioral and organizational reactions to the measurements, a topic we discuss extensively in Chapter 9. Even more important, when the measurements are used not only for information, planning, and decision making but also for control, evaluation, and reward, employees and managers place great emphasis on the measurements themselves. Managers and employees may take unexpected and undesirable actions to influence their score on the performance measure. For example, managers seeking to improve current bonuses based on reported profits may skip discretionary expenditures such as preventive maintenance, research and development, and advertising that may improve performance in future periods. Thus we must be ever vigilant to not only see the analytic, or left-brain, properties of management accounting information but also appreciate the emotional, or right-brain, reactions by individuals to the information used to monitor and eval