The Role of Management Control and Relationship between Management Control Usage and Planned Change Achievement: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

This paper explores the extent to which managers believe their management control are employed when implementing planned change. Relationships between commonly employed management controls and implementation success are also estimated using data drawn from managers in 22 organizations in Nigeria. Although the relevance of management control to successful change achievement has been conceptually acknowledged, empirical matters such as measuring the contribution of control to effective change implementation lack practical investigation. Results indicated that managers used management control less extensively than other elements of change process, although usage of control increased with implementation. A strong relationship was found between the use of control based on outcomes monitoring and implementation success. However, there was no significant relationship between the uses of behavior based controls and implementation success. Overall, the findings suggest that many organizations may underutilize formal controls, particularly those related to outcomes monitoring, when managing change.

Keywords: Management, Control, Usage, utilization, managers