The Neo Accountant Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

The Neo Accountant - Essay Example A. Hopwood has correctly stated: "Accountants and other members of the management team searching for means of understanding and improving standard setting and budgeting; must therefore see the process in its entirety and respond to it as a complex human and technical problem rather than one standing in technical isolation." The Contingency Theory can best explain how management should respond to proposed change. The theory is summed up in two words: It depends! Accountants and other members of the management team will have to respond to each situation by looking at it whole. According to Fiedler's Contingency Theory of Situational Leadership, situations of proposed change that appear low in control must be managed in a directive and task-oriented manner. On the other hand, situations that are high in control must simply be dealt with in a supportive fashion; in this case, managers can stay out of their subordinates' way to a large extent (Boje). All changes in accounting practices are sure to have extensive effects on the organization as a whole and the community of people it is involved with. Accounting practices with the aid of latest technology that make an organization more efficient may improve the state of an entire economy. Given that finance is the basis of organizational operation, accountants cannot isolate themselves and be looking for an improvement in accounting practices without consulting other branches of management as a team. Consultation, then, has got to be the first step in the introduction of accounting or managerial change. This essential step to change involves many departments of management, including planning. Forecasters and planners along with those that propose change have to work in agreement before any lasting change can be implemented, let alone expected to have results that lead to increased efficiency, productivity, and profitability. According to Brewer, Brownlee, and Juras, who have writte n on the implementation of activity based costing and the change management process: "Implementing change in an organization is about ninety percent cultural and ten percent technical." To put it another way, applying accounting change is easy when it comes to the technical side of things. But organizational change is never about technicalities alone. Before applying new accounting principles expected to lead to greater organizational success, it takes a long time for any firm to convince the people that it must convince, and plan with the workforce it must plan change with. Vroom And Yetton's Contingency Model of Normative Leader Decisions is clear on this point. The model asks for consultation or the group decision process if the commitment of group is essential. But if the managers have got all the necessary information, they are advised to be autocrats, making decisions for all and going with the flow (Boje). Take the example of digitization alone for the simple fact that the technological age has brought tremendous change in all areas of human life. Bhimani writes about digitization only in an organizational context:Digitization impacts the form, substance, and provenance of internal accountinginformation with attendant consequences on the behavior and actions of organizationalparticipants and on the functioning of enterprises more widely. Knowledge about theinfluence of the deployment of