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Grosu Corina
West University of Timisoara, Romania
Almasan Alina
West University of Timisoara, Romania
1. Introduction
The manner in which management accounting is perceived in the Romanian business environment is deeply disappointing, in terms both of the managers' attitude and of the accountants' interest in providing useful information for the decision making process. The developments over the last twenty-five years in the Romanian accounting field had a huge contribution to this situation.
The management accounting field is just slightly covered by the studies conducted in Romania. Most of the published papers are oriented towards the identification of the existing management accounting tools and techniques and their use in practice (Almasan and Grosu, 2009; Volkan, 2007; Volkan, 2008; Albu, 2008; Albu, 2003). None of these papers approaches the behavior of the accounting information providers and users.
The adoption of the French accounting system in 1993/1994, which replaced the accounting system used in the communist period, led to a separation between the financial and the management accounting. This disruption was exacerbated, on the one hand, by the existing regulations which made companies focus more on the tax compliance and, on the other hand, by the attitude of accountants and managers, who left the management accounting in the background.
Almasan and Grosu (2008) note that the providers and the users of accounting information have different motivations and attitudes which lead to highly different perceptions. In time, a gap appeared between managers and accountants regarding their perceptions about the collaboration which should exist between them. Shields (1995) identified a potential source of the difference between these perceptions. He argued that the changes of the accounting system are simple administrative innovations, their success depending on the manner in which the behavioral and organizational implications are managed.
The way these implications are managed influences the relevance of the accounting system for those interested in the information provided. Most of the studies focused rather on the perception of the managers (as users of the information), than on the perception of the accountants (Pierce and O'Dea, 2003). In this context, our paper investigates the accountants' perception - as providers of the accounting information - regarding the role of management accounting in the Romanian organizations. In fact, it resumes the topic approached by...