Management Control Systems, Environmental Uncertainty, and Organizational Slack: Empirical Evidence

This study examines the relations among management control systems (MCS), environmental uncertainty (EU), and organizational slack (OS). Given a firm's EU, managing OS requires the support of an appropriately designed MCS. Thus, for different levels of OS and EU, we examine two forms of MCS: budgetary control and performance measurement system encompassing both financial and nonfinancial measures. EU and OS were determined using archival data, and MCS data was obtained via a survey questionnaire to chief executive officers (CEOs). As hypothesized, the results show that, given firms’ EU, the two forms of control play distinct but different roles in managing OS.