Together with Paula van Veen-Dirks and Henk ter Bogt, I published this week a paper in the European Accounting Review. In the paper we study the relation between management control, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and performance. We use survey data from 105 departments from Dutch municipalities to test our hypotheses.

We find that the use of personnel and cultural controls is positively associated with employees’ intrinsic motivation, and that the use of results controls is positively associated with employees’ extrinsic motivation. Moreover, we find that both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation are positively associated with performance.

You can find the full paper here.