The information and control functions of management control systems in product development: Empirical and analytical perspectives

The motivation for this thesis is to understand how management control systems (MCS) are used in new product development projects. This topic is addressed from different theoretical and methodological perspectives. The concept of MCS recognizes that these systems fulfill two distinct roles in organizations. First, they define the "information infrastructure" of an organization. Second, they align the motivation of the various organizational participants to alleviate the goal congruence problem. These two roles are frequently in conflict and the design of MCS needs to trade-off these competing demands.; Chapters 1 and 2 report the results from an empirical investigation based on a survey to companies in the United States and Europe. Chapter 1 looks at the information characteristics of MCS. The theoretical basis for this chapter interprets the organization as an information processing system. Product complexity, product strategy, and project structure are found to affect the design of MCS. Furthermore, the information characteristics of MCS are related to product development performance.; Chapter 2 studies MCS as contracting tools. Agency theory is the theoretical background of this chapter. The results find support for adverse selection and moral hazard stories. There is also evidence of a positive relationship between the existence of economic incentives and product development performance.; Chapter 3 studies the tension that exists between the information and control roles of MCS from an analytical perspective. The chapter presents a mathematical model where a signal has information for investment decisions and about the agent's effort. The model identifies four conditions where a trade-off between both roles emerges.; Chapters 4 and 5 are descriptive studies based on field data collected through visits to several companies that collaborated in this study. Chapter 4 is a grounded typology of systems that companies use to select new products. It identifies four different approaches to select new products. The typology also describes contingency variables and an evolutionary model on how new product selection systems vary over time.; Finally, chapter 5 identifies six different objectives fulfilled by MCS during the product development process. The importance of each objective is discussed in the framework of successive product development stages.