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[Ahmad2017]

The association between strategic management accounting and organizational performance: A field study in Saudi companies

ABSTRACT
In the last decade, many dramatic changes in the organizations’ environment have led to fundamental transformations in the framework of management accounting practices, specifically the shift toward practicing its functions and tasks from a strategic point of view. This exploratory study examines the impact of strategic management accounting practices on organizational performance. Using data from 124 accounting managers working in Saudi companies listed in the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul), the present study finds that practicing management accounting from a strategic perspective significantly affects organizational, financial and non-financial performance. In the context of its proposed model, the present study supports the idea that organizations can enhance their organizational performance through adopting some facets of strategic management accounting such as the availability of appropriate structural arrangements, supportive resources, adequate information types and usages, and good organizational climates.
Key words: strategic management accounting, organizational performance, financial performance, non-financial performance, Saudi companies.

1. Introduction
Over the past two decades, the business environment has undergone successive changes as a result of the heavy reliance on information systems, modern communications, and openness to global market. These changes have resulted in increasing pressures on organizations to be more competitive and shift their attention to maximize efficiency in exploiting resources in order to control markets or maintain their competitive positions. Therefore, traditional management practices are no longer sufficient for organizational growth and to survive in this new era. Moreover, managers need a high quality and reliable information to manage their organizations, especially under the interrelated factors of their surrounding environment.
In this millennium, management accounting has become one of the vital nerves for the decision-making process in organizations because of its strategic role in providing useful and significant information for the top management in order to cope with the business environment and run the organization effectively, efficiently, and economically. However, in the intense global and technologically competitive atmosphere, contemporary organizations have started paying more attention to practicing management accounting from a strategic point of view (Mia and Clarke, 1999; Noordin et al., 2009). Most contemporary organizations have forsaken the traditional management accounting because it has failed to provide the information required for their strategic decision making process (Roslender and Hart 2002), competitiveness, and future-oriented performance (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987). However, shifting toward the strategic approach to management accounting is partially based on the grounds that such as approach can show the reflection and correlation between strategic management methods and the information that the accountants seek to provide (Bromwich and Bhimani, 1989; Johnson and Kaplan,1987).
With regard to the strategic approach to practicing management accounting, which has been labeled “Strategic Management Accounting” (SMA), the emphasis is intentionally directed to shift the focus of management accounting from an inward-oriented perspective (e.g. historical and internal information) to an outward-oriented perspective (e.g. external and market- oriented information), specifically with regard to competitors, customers and the external environment (Roslender, 1995 and 2006; Cravens and Guilding 2001; Kırlı and Gümüş, 2011). Additionally, in the light of this approach, an organization strategy represents a contextual factor that shapes the nature of management accounting practices, and therefore, it enhances organizational capabilities for achieving sustainable competitive advantages (Roslender and Hart, 2002). Moreover, SMA can help create strategic values through the effective and efficient use of resources (Chenhall and Langfield-Smith, 199, directing and controlling the operational activities, measuring the performance at all organizational levels and estimating the organization's competitive position (Hilton 200.
Despite the conceptualized relationship between SMA and organizational performance, the empirical studies that support this relationship have been scant. Nixon and Bums (2012) state that SMA suffers from a lack of empirically based research. Moreover, most empirical work in this area has conceptualized and opertionalized SMA based on the two main facets of strategically oriented accounting developed by Cadez and Guilding (200. These are: the adoption of SMA techniques and tools and management accountants’ involvement in strategic management processes. So, deploying these two SMA facets has been used by most researchers as indicators for practicing SMA in organizations (Wooldridge and Floyd, 1990; Tillmann and Godddard, 2008; Cadez and Guilding, 2008 and 2012; Ah Lay and Jusoh, 2011; Dunk, 2011; Gadez and Guilding, 2012; Aksoylu and Aykan, 2013; Ann, 2015). Other researchers in the field of SMA try to identify the contextual factors in the effective use of SMA techniques (Chenhall and Langfield-Smith, 1998, Abernethy and Brownell, 1999; Kennedy and Affleck-Graves, 2001; Malina and Selto, 2001; Hoque and James, 2000; Chenhall, 2005). Applying financial information to strategic planning and monitoring the market and competition information are also used as indicators for practicing SMA in organizations (Collier and Gregory, 1994).
Past findings on the relationship between SMA practices and organizational performance are limited and not conclusive. For example, Chenhall and Langfield-Smith (199 and Ah Lay and Jusoh (2011) have found a positive relationship between the usage of SMA techniques and organizational performance. However, other empirical studies have found no significant or weak associations between the two variables (e.g. Aksoylu and Aykan, 2013). In business Arab environments, particularly in Saudi Arabia, it is noticeable that there is no one piece of empirical research dealing with SMA. To sum up, there is a gap in our current understanding of the influence of SMA practices on organizational performance as indicated by past literature (e.g. Nixon and Bums, 2012). The limited amount of empirical evidence regarding the influence of SMA practices on organizational performance can make contemporary organizations in developed and developing countries less aware of the role of these practices in enhancing performance outcomes. To help address this gap, the objective of the current study is primarily to present an extended conceptualization of SMA facets in organizations, and examine whether these facets influence the organizational performance significantly. Therefore, the study contributes to the research base in the field of SMA by extending the underlying SMA facets found in literature, and exploring their linkages with financial and non-financial performance in order to further expand our current understanding of the role of SMA in organizations. In particular, this study addresses the following question: “What is the effect of SMA on organizational performance?”
This study can accede to the counterparts of other business environments which also suffer from scarcity in this subject. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to bridge the shortfall in addressing management accounting from a strategic perspective, and investigate its impact on organizational performance. Hopefully, this may contribute to drawing managers’ attention in contemporary organizations to the importance of this vital issue and increasing their knowledge of how to provide the basic building blocks for this issue on scientific and applied bases.
The remainder of the paper is organized in six sections. The second section presents the literature review of the study and discusses the concept SMA and its facets. The third section covers the development of the study’s theoretical framework and hypotheses. The methodology used in conducting the current study and the results are presented in sections four and five. Finally, section six presents the discussion of the findings, the conclusion, as well as suggestions for future research.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Strategic Management Accounting (SMA)

[Ahmad2017]

As the interpretation of the word strategy is controversial, and as the definition of the process of strategic management is fraught with many problems; no consensus about the definition of SMA has been found in accounting literature. In defining SMA, three common streams have been identified in the accounting literature. The first stream has used the term SMA as a synonym of “accounting for strategic positioning” (Roslender, 1995 and 2006; Cravens and Guilding, 2001) in referring to the overall developments in the field of management accounting. While the second stream has treated SMA as an approach to bridging the strategy literature and management accounting into a unified strategic perspective (Lord, 1996; Bhimani and Keshtvarz, 1999; Guilding et al., 2000), the third stream has defined SMA based on the literature developed by Simmonds (1981, 1982 and 1986) and Bromwich (1988 and 1990). Both authors treated the term SMA as a means to support the strategic management process in organizations. According to Simmonds (1981), SMA is a range of activities that provide and analyze management accounting data on the organization and its competitors in order to formulate and monitor the organization’s strategy. He reported that management accountants are best able to perform these activities since they have the skills and competencies that enable them to clarify any changes in the competitive position of the top management in the organization. In the same vein, Bromwich (198 stressed the importance of SMA in providing information about the external areas of organizations such as markets, products, suppliers, competitors and customers.
However, the researcher believes that these three streams of SMA do not differ significantly from each other, since the developments in the field of management accounting resulted from attempts to develop new management accounting practices that can provide information to support the strategic direction of organizations. In general, two main different points of view have resulted from these streams of SMA: (1) SMA includes a set of strategic tools and techniques; and (2) SMA conveys the active participation and involvement of management accountants in the strategic decision-making process, planning and control (Aksoylu and Aykan, 2013). Hogue (2001) defined SMA as "a process of identifying, gathering, choosing and analyzing accounting data for helping the management team to make strategic decisions and to assess organizational effectiveness." (p. 2). Furthermore, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants’ official terminology defines SMA as “a form of management accounting in which emphasis is placed on information which relates to factors external to the entity, as well as non-financial information and internally generated information.” (Jack 2009, p. 1). Therefore, SMA is a generic approach to accounting with external and prospective orientation for strategic positioning (Carmen and Corina, 2009) and control activities (Groot and Selto, 2013).
In order to identify the contributions of activities, processes or products in the achievement of the organization’s strategy, management accounting-strategic management linkage goes through three phases of development. The first phase is characterized by the emergence of new techniques in the field of management accounting (e.g. activity-based costing, strategic cost analysis, quality cost accounting, and cost of energy) as a source of information about the internal performance of an organization (Kaplan, 1983, 1984 and 198. In the second phase, attempts focus on the development of generic approaches as a means of strengthening the strategic position of an organization. These approaches focus heavily on the activity or operational excellence and try to achieve an appropriate linkage between different organizational functions (e.g. management accounting, production and operation, and marketing management) and the external aspects of organizational performance (Roslender, 1995). For instant, activity-based accounting as a comprehensive method includes several interrelated approaches such as consumer profitability analysis, direct product profitability, activity-based budgets and mapping of activities. The final phase of management accounting-strategic management linkage leads to the emergence of managerial philosophies that aim to achieve the competitive advantage of organization and improve organizational performance (Roslender and Hart, 2002). Activity-based management, strategic cost management and target cost management are the most prominent philosophies that have achieved a clear accounting echo to cope with turbulent business environments. Despite the clear overlap between these philosophies, each of them has a different way of how to integrate SMA methods and achieve sustainable competitive advantages. However, the main outcome of these phases was to develop SMA techniques and integrate them into organizations’ functions and performance.
According to Brouthers and Roozen (1999), SMA is best able to provide information that addresses and supports the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of strategic management processes at all organizational levels. However, this information should have both internal and external orientations with reliable projections of the future which are mostly non-financial (Cinquini and Tenucci, 2010). Moreover, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) indicates that the management accounting role has extended to a wide range of areas such as a strategic partner, managing performance, and managing risks in order to support the strategic intent of organizations (Ahid and Augustine, 2012). According to Noordin et al. (2015), SMA is “the provision of information and analysis of major competitors, customers, and product-related features that enable organization to monitor and evaluate the progress of its competitive strategy and long-term achievement in the market place” (p. 15).
This management accounting-strategic management linkage or fit is considered a necessity for contemporary organizations to survive and grow. However, to enhance this linkage, appropriate management accounting practices should be developed in order to support the strategic priorities of organizations (Gadez and Guilding, 2012; Hammad et al. 2010; Trkman, 2010). Two distinct SMA practices have been identified in past literature and tovshape the conceptualizing of SMA. These are (Cadez and Guilding, 200: (1) the adoption and usage of SMA techniques and tools (2) accountants’ involvement and participation in the strategic making process. Other SMA constitutes (facets) are still limited and need further investigation.
To enhance the integration of management accounting and strategic management, the organization needs to design its functions and activities in a systematic way by tailoring the inputs, processes and outputs of management accounting in a harmonic way with the corporate, business, and functional strategies of the organization (vertical fit or linkage) (Bhimani and Langfield-Smith, 2007). So, management accounting practices as a part or sub-system of the organization’s accounting system should be integrated with the overall strategy of the organization to achieve its vision, mission and objectives (Chenhall and Langfield-Smith, 199. Furthermore, a horizontal fit within SMA practices should also be taken into consideration, that is to say, the internal consistency of SMA’s practices and procedures (Gadez and Guilding, 2012). For example, the adoption and usage of SMA techniques and tools should be consistent with active accountants’ participation in strategy processes, as the later needs to inculcate accountants to provide the needed information for strategic purposes (Abernethy and Bouwens, 2005). Delery and Doty (1996) argue that organizational performance can be enhanced by demonstrating both horizontal and vertical fits in SMA practices.
Therefore, management accounting cannot operate in isolation from organizational strategic intents and other functions. The main question that may emerge in this context is “how can the organization enhance the strategic role of management accounting, and what are the main facets for measuring this?” To answer this question, the researcher of this study has reviewed many previous research studies on the field of SMA (e.g. Simmonds, 1981; Broomwich, 1990; Wilson 1995; Collier and Gregory, 1995; Lord, 1996; Guilding, 1999; Guilding et al., 2000; Guilding and McManus, 2002; Chenhall, 2003; Hilton 2008; Cadez and Guilding, 2008 and 2012; Bamber et al., 2008; Shah et al., 2011; Ah Lay and Jusoh, 2011), and identified a number of facets (practices) that can enhance the strategic role of management accounting, and these facets can be used as indicators to measure the extent to which organizations adopt the SMA approach. These facets are:
(1) The existence of formal and informal advisory channels in organizations in order to make management accounting information as a fundamental input in the processes of strategy formulation, implementation and evaluation. Assigning management accounting managers in senior management positions, and considering them strategic partners in an organization's management team are the main indicators for such practice.
(2) The availability of a specialized management accounting unit in the organization’s structure for managing management accounting activities and processes equipped with necessary abilities, expertise and experiences.

[Ahmad2017]

(3) The adoption and use of external and market- oriented management accounting techniques with a strategic focus (e.g. long-term and future-oriented) such as cost process implementation techniques (e.g. activity-based costing, target costing, quality costing, attribute costing, and life-cycle costing), performance evaluation adoption techniques (e.g. balanced scorecard and benchmarking), competitor-oriented appraisal techniques (e.g. competitive position monitoring and competitor cost assessment), and customer-oriented analysis (e.g. customer profitability analysis and customer valuation) to make better strategic decisions.
(4) The availability of effective management accounting information systems based on modern technology applications, with the ability to provide inputs for strategic decision-making and strategic control. According to Chenhall and Langfield-Smith (199, these systems are recognized as one of the most effective and powerful tools that can have a significant influence on organizational growth. Competitors, customers, and product-related information should be the main elements of analysis for these systems.
(5) Adequate support and encouragement from the top management for practicing SMA. Positive attitudes of senior management, open relationships with senior management, a supportive organizational culture, and credibility are some of the main success factors for effective SMA practices. According to Chartered Institute of Management Accountants’ project in 2015, the accountants’ involvement in the strategic management process depends on their organizational position, the culture of the organization, their relationships with CEO and credibility (CIMA Executive Summary Report, p. 1).
All of the above-mentioned facets or practices can help the organization achieve an appropriate and consistent alignment between management accounting and the organization for strategic purposes in the first place, and bring high possibilities to bring about the desired competitive advantages. Recently, SMA has been represented as an essential practice that plays a significant role in identifying and evaluating the strategic competitive policies which result in achieving higher performance and competitive advantages (Hilton 200.
3. Theoretical Framework and Hypothesis Development
The focus of this study is to identify the main facets of SMA practices in an organization, and examine their impacts on organizational performance. While there is a consensus that SMA has its integral role in facilitating organizational performance (Chenhall and Langfield-Smith, 1998; Cadez and Guilding, 2008 and 2012; Hammad et al., 2010; Carr et al., 2010; Trkman, 2010), there is still limited consensus with respect to what constitutes SMA practices (Gadez and Guilding, 2012). In this study, the researcher expands Cadez and Guilding’s (200 SMA conceptualization by identifying a set of five facets of SMA practices rather than two. This expansion as identified in the literature on this field is based on the configurational theory bases which enhance the comprehensive view of organizations as multiple and interconnected parts and practices (Fiss, 2007), and represent organizational performance and effectiveness as outcomes of the internal consistency amongst these parts and practices (Doty et al., 1993). Therefore, expanding the facets of SMA practices can help widen our understanding of what constitutes SMA, and cover both horizontal and vertical fits in SMA practices. In this study, many organizational elements, such as a supportive structure and resources, information usage, culture, top management support, and climate, as identified by previous research studies, are used to expand the SMA conceptualization.
In assuming a contingency approach, these five facets will be deployed in a causal model as antecedents of organizational performance. The theoretical model of this study (see Figure 1) demonstrates that organizational performance (financial and non-financial) is enhanced by the existence of these five facets of SMA practices.

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