Business Budgeting Gamesmanship:Determinants And Economic Consequences

Budget is wildly used as one of the most important management control tools in business groups.Through literature review,a large number of researches display that from the perspective of practical application,budget have a positive effect on the planning and control,allocation of financial and non-financial resources,and motivating staff to achieve the strategic and operational objectives.On the other hand,budget also has some side effect,such as Dysfunctional behaviors and Budgeting games.to maximize the participants' benefits regardless of the owner's benefits.We named all these behaviors as Gamesmanship,which means the participants get the more satisfied budget goals or the level of budget targets through intervention or influencebudgeting process.However,from the literature review,the research on the gamesmanship is mostly conducted within Western culture's context.They lacks of empirical study in China,and this paper attempts to do the relative research on the gamesmanship in China and further analyze the determinants and economic consequences.In details,the paper first explores budgeting gamesmanship and confirm the budgeting gamesmanship mentioned in Western research through questionnaire.The researches display that gamesmanship also exists in China,but there is no analytic and summarized category and supplement Chinese gamesmanship.The paper aims at finding and analyzing the differences between Western and Chinese gamesmanships.Three types of budget gamesmanship are analyzed in the paper,including speculative behaviors,trouble-making behaviors and communication-maintaining behaviors.We also find five budget gamesmanship that not been identified before.Second,we detect budget gamesmanship in the framework of budget management and control systems,analyzing the mechanism of the impact of environmental factors on budget system and gamesmanship.We study the mechanism from the perspective of budget characteristics,finding that budget is influenced by environment and further influences budget gamesmanship as well.‘Budget' in ‘budget characteristics' emphasizes on positively correlation with budgeting gamesmanship.Then budgeting participation contributes to speculative behaviors.The completeness of budgeting target on the contrary leads to trouble-making behaviors and communication-maintaining behaviors.The difficult level of budgeting goal can reduce speculative behaviors and trouble-making behaviors.Finally,as an important innovation of this paper,this paper first studies the economic consequences of budget gamesmanship,finding that the self-reliance behavior benefits the improvement of performance while trouble-making behavior worsens the business performance,and communication-maintaining behaviors have no relation with business performance.These behaviors are influenced by system characteristics and operation method.Therefore,it is important to adjust characteristics and operation method of budget system to better control objectives of budget management control system.