Accounting for Professional Accountants' Dysfunctional Knowledge Sharing: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective

Investigating how and why accounting professionals share useless and harmful knowledge challenges designers of accounting systems and organizational leaders. In this paper, we extend self-determination theory (SDT) to investigate the influence of financial incentives on (1) harmful, and (2) masked,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of information systems 2018-03, Vol.32 (1), p.45-65
Main Authors: Cockrell, R. Cameron, Stone, Dan N., Wier, Benson
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accounting
Accounting systems
Incentives
Information sharing
Knowledge sharing
Monetary incentives
Motivation
Professionals
Studies
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Summary:Investigating how and why accounting professionals share useless and harmful knowledge challenges designers of accounting systems and organizational leaders. In this paper, we extend self-determination theory (SDT) to investigate the influence of financial incentives on (1) harmful, and (2) masked, i.e., organizationally useless, knowledge sharing (KS) among accounting professionals (n = 428) by adapting measures from SDT to the professional accounting context. Although self-disclosed dysfunctional KS is infrequent in our sample, the results indicate that, consistent with the predictions of our extension of SDT, accountants with higher controlled (higher autonomous) motivation are more (less) influenced by financial incentives and engage in more (less) dysfunctional KS. Data Availability: Contact the authors.
ISSN:0888-7985
1558-7959
DOI:10.2308/isys-51677