• Performance; PMS; Management accounting change;

The design, implementation, and use of management accounting systems have been a topic that aroused great interest both among researchers and practitioners. In the last thirty years, increased competition, information systems innovation, and technological change have led companies to frequently modify their strategies and adopt more advanced management accounting tools.
Historically, the interest in more developed management accounting systems was sparked by the publication of Johnson & Kaplan's (1987) seminal work "Relevance Lost," which suggested that old management accounting systems, mainly based on financial measures, were not sufficient anymore and sometimes even detrimental.
Years later, the subject of how management accounting systems are developed, introduced, implemented, or changed is still relevant, and management accounting change has become an important line of research. Some significant examples of the new management accounting tools that spread considerably starting from the 90s are the new cost management systems, such as activity-based costing, and the more "balanced" performance measurement and management systems, composed of both financial and non-financial indicators, like the balanced scorecard or the Performance Prism.
Concerning the performance measurement and management systems (PMS), which are the focus of this work, many different issues emerged regarding their implementation. Despite the growing interest in PMS, field experiences have revealed difficulties related to their development, introduction, and use. The complications in designing these kinds of tools are many and primarily related to the need to adapt the PMS to specific business contexts and to identify which indicators are useful to measure and evaluate. Still, another relevant category of problems, which can lead to failure, especially during the implementation phase, is related to the human factor and behavioral and psychological aspects, such as resistance to change and the loss or absence of commitment towards the tool.
Management accounting change scholars have adopted many different perspectives and frameworks to explain the complex and multidimensional phenomena of change. Management accounting change turns out to be an extremely interdisciplinary research field, as it offers studies based on diverse theoretical foundations, ranging from philosophy and sociology to organizational behavior and theory.
The approach adopted by this thesis finds its roots in organization development and change, organization behavior, and organization theory, as well as in the psychological and behavioral sciences field. Specifically, it adopts an organizational change management perspective to analyze the management accounting change process. Since change management theories and prescriptive models deal extensively with these issues, some scholars (Nudurupati et al., 2011; Broadbent & Laughlin, 2005; Bourne et a., 2002,2003) have indicated that applying change management theories to PMS implementation studies may help better understand the success and failure dynamics. Research on PMS has also noted over the years a dearth of studies on PMS and Balanced Scorecard implementation and has suggested that future research should focus on identifying strategies to support their successful introduction and use.
Although organizational change management theories do not seem to be frequently contemplated in management accounting literature, this study would like to explore their applicability within this field, considering its strongly interdisciplinary nature, to understand better why some firms are more successful than others in adopting PMS. In addition, it has been reported that a change in management accounting systems is sometimes related to a major organizational transformation or is part of it, which also implies a change in the organizational strategy and culture, in the technologies adopted, and in the assigned tasks: all kinds of topics considered by change management literature. Finally, focusing on specific management accounting systems such as PMS seems legitimate because the non-financial measurement is an essential instance of management accounting change (Vaivio, 1999).
In particular, this thesis aims to understand, without adopting a prescriptive approach, if the enabling and hindering factors identified by organizational change management literature seem to play a role in accepting, disseminating, and using PMS across a company.
To do this, we investigate, through the analysis of a case study, whether the critical factors identifiable in the change model developed by Stouten et al. (2018) affect the successful implementation of these tools. We chose the framework by Stouten et al. (2018) because, unlike the majority of change management models (Rosenbaum, 2018; Hughes, 2016), it is based on scientific evidence and prior literature. Moreover, it is much more recent than the most popular change management models and hence takes into account the latest developments and findings of the research field.
The active implementation of a PMS is here regarded as a disruptive change (Burns and Vaivio, 2001), where a series of difficulties related to individuals' resistance to change, power, politics, and organizational culture may have to be assessed and managed (Carlucci, Schiuma & Sole, 2015). Moreover, we admit that the effective implementation of a PMS does not merely involve the introduction of a new management accounting tool but also developing new knowledge and skills, reorganizing assigned responsibilities, and even changing the organization's culture. Therefore, the kind of change analyzed here is not evolutionary, slow, or incremental. Instead, it is major, radical, and revolutionary (Gersick, 1991).
This thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 2 is devoted to a literature review on performance measurement systems. A brief historical overview of why and how PMS developed is first provided. After that, it is shown a rundown of the main models. We then proceed to define the characteristics that PMS must have to be described as such to establish the boundaries of this work. Finally, a literature review on PMS implementation is presented, taking into account the literature on management accounting and operations management and strategy.
Chapter 3 is entirely devoted to illustrating the main theories of change management and the theoretical framework of Stouten et al. (2018). Here the history related to the development of the change management models is delivered together with a description of the characteristics of the most successful proposals. The more recent Stouten et al. (2018) framework has also been analyzed in great detail, presenting the similarities and differences with other previously proposed change models. An analysis of the enabling and hindering factors found in the model is also provided, comparing them with the factors identified in the literature related to PMS. We then summarize those factors that are less explored by the PMS literature but suggested as crucial by the change management literature and Stouten et al. (2018).
In chapter 4, we present the methodology of the case study, explaining why the case was chosen, how the data were collected, and the approach used to carry out the analysis.
In chapter 5, we present the results, first giving a summary description of the case, the change process, and the control system put in place. The last paragraph is wholly devoted to presenting the coded data to show the results that are later interpreted and discussed. To analyze these data, we used Bourne et al.'s (2000) framework to decompose the change process into different stages and Stouten et al.'s (2018) framework to see the effects of hindering and enabling factors and the timing with which the most significant events for the change process happened. We also used Kasurinen's (2002) framework, which helped us explain the effects of the identified enablers and hinderers.
In chapter 6, devoted to the discussion of the results, we evidence the thesis's theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions. With reference to the theoretical contributions, we proposed an expansion of the frameworks of Bourne et al. (2000), already employed in the previous chapter, to provide a more effective presentation of the results, and Kasurinen (2002), made possible by cross-referencing them with the framework of Stouten et al. (2018). From an empirical point of view, this work helps to underscore the relevance of certain elements considered important by the change management literature but ignored or little considered by the PMS literature (e.g., change readiness). From a practical perspective, although the Stouten et al. (2018) model has not been applied in the field, we have gathered evidence that supports the usefulness of the approaches contained in the model as well as the role played by enabling and hindering factors.
Finally, chapter 7 summarizes the thesis and the most significant contributions.