مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد جهت گیری های ذی نفع و مدیریت هزینه – وایلی 2017

Stakeholder orientation, hereby defined, reflects the relative attention a firm gives to its nonshareholding stakeholders, such as customers, employees, communities, and the natural environment (Berman, et al. 1999; Stavrou et al. 2007; Crilly and Sloan 2012).1 Accounting researchers have explored many issues surrounding external disclosure and stakeholder management (Dhaliwal et al. 2011; Moser and Martin 2012; Kim et al. 2012). Yet the implications of stakeholder orientation on a firm’s internal resource management and adjustment have remained largely unexplored. Given the growing attention paid to stakeholders by both executives and academics, it is important to understand whether stakeholder orientation affects firms’ internal management practices, including resource adjustment decisions. We examine how stakeholder orientation affects a firm’s resource adjustments, captured by SG&A cost stickiness. Cost stickiness is itself a growing body of research (e.g., Banker and Byzalov 2014). SG&A costs typically account for a significant fraction of a company’s total costs. In our sample of 19,783 observations from 1990 to 2013, the mean (median) ratio of SG&A costs to total costs (including both cost of goods sold and SG&A costs) is 32 (27) percent. Anderson et al. (2003) document that SG&A costs are sticky in that they decrease less when sales fall than they increase when sales rise by an equivalent amount. Anderson et al. (2003) propose two theories underlying the observed cost stickiness: adjustment cost theory and agency theory. Adjustment cost theory suggests that firms incur adjustment costs (e.g., severance pay to dismissed employees, loss of employee morale, or training costs for new employees) when making resource capacity adjustments. When sales increase, managers must acquire the required resources, whereas when sales decrease, managers may intentionally delay reducing resource capacity to avoid adjustment costs, which results in cost stickiness (Banker et al. 2013). Agency costs can also contribute to cost stickiness because managers have empire building incentives or “a preference for a quiet life,” such that they refrain from cutting slack resources when sales decline. Subsequent work has identified factors associated with cost stickiness, including prior activity change, managerial expectations, and incentives (Chen et al. 2012; Dierynck et al. 2012; Banker and Byzalov 2014). Stakeholders such as customers, employees, communities, and the environment can directly or indirectly influence a firm’s operations. We focus on customer relations and employee relations as they capture corporate orientation toward two primary stakeholder groups: customers and employees (Berman et al. 1999; Kim et al. 2012). By examining different stakeholder areas, we are able to distinguish heterogeneous effects of various stakeholder orientations on resource adjustments.