Accounting control and performance measurement in a teamworking environment

Flexible organisations are widely perceived to be essential in sustaining competitive advantage in an uncertain world, where innovation is explosive and coming from unexpected directions, where consumer preferences change rapidly and where global competition is increasingly the rule. Empowered teams are a major part of the current shift towards flexible organisations, but so far relatively little attention has been paid either to the impact that this will have on accounting controls or on the appropriateness of traditional measures of performance. This paper explores alternative models of teamworking and uses evidence from three actual cases to point to both problems and potential solutions.