Assessing the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals in academic libraries

The United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development identifies 17 goals as a shared blueprint for peace, prosperity, people and the planet. Australian academic libraries have started documenting and planning how academic libraries contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the identification of assessment frameworks and key performance indicators. In 2019, the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) Library stepped through an exercise of understanding how our day-to-day work and annual planning targets mapped to the SDGs. The article is a case study. The authors outline how an academic library’s services, projects and action plans were mapped to the SDGs and how the mapping exercise was communicated to the community. The article will situate this activity among the broader approaches being taken by the Australian library community, including the 2030 stretch targets for Australian libraries. USQ Library staff found that existing services, collections and projects correlated to eight of the 17 SDGs. Activities were mapped to these eight goals and reported to senior executive of the University. The mapping exercise increased the awareness of library staff about the broader cultural and societal implications of their roles. The communication strategy led to conversations that increased university leaders’ awareness of the SDGs and the value and impact of USQ Library in improving access to information as well as the library’s role in transforming the lives of USQ students and community. By undertaking an exercise to map collections, services and projects to the SDGs, USQ Library has been able to demonstrate how their knowledge and information infrastructures which enable student achievement and research excellence. The SDGs can be used by university libraries as a benchmarking tool and as a challenge to set stretch targets aligned with the United Nation’s 2030 agenda.

The impact of procedural and distributive justice on satisfaction and manufacturing performance: a replication of Lindquist (1995) with a focus on the importance of common metrics in experimental design

This paper replicates Lindquist’s (Lindquist, Journal of Management Accounting Research 7:122–147, 1995) seminal research introducing the concepts of justice to the accounting literature. We use organizational justice theory, as did he, to replicate his study and, in doing so, question some findings of partial replications and extensions done over the past 25 years. We do this because work built off his study has challenged some of his findings. These challenges, we believe, have resulted from most researchers using different research metrics than did Lindquist. Many of these extensions have also used a mental-based task, instead of a manual-based one, in their experiments. We believe this constrains the ability to draw inferences and conclusions from this subsequent research. We further believe this constraint extends to much of the experimental research in the social sciences.In our research we replicate exactly Lindquist’s (Lindquist, Journal of Management Accounting Research 7:122–147, 1995) operationalizations of voice and vote and measure dependent outcomes for four of the same conditions he investigated. In contrast to most of other follow-up studies, we find, as did Lindquist, that having a voice only leads to significantly enhanced satisfaction with high-stretch targets, as compared to having a vote only or no input. We also corroborate Lindquist’s (Lindquist, Journal of Management Accounting Research 7:122–147, 1995) result that having a voice only leads to significantly greater satisfaction with the experimental task, as compared to participants with a vote only or no input. Additionally, unlike Lindquist (Lindquist, Journal of Management Accounting Research 7:122–147, 1995), we find participants allowed only a voice significantly outperform participants with a vote only and no input. We thus support Lindquist’s findings of a fair process effect for voice and perceptions of pseudo-participation related to vote.

BUDGETARY PARTICIPATION AND STRETCH TARGETS: PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS IN A STRETCH BUDGET CONDITION

Penganggaran yang berkaitan dengan masalah perilaku memiliki pengaruh penting pada efektivitas organisasi. Partisipasi anggaran umumnya mengacu pada sejauh mana bawahan berpartisipasi dalam penyusunan anggaran dan mempengaruhi sasaran anggaran. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk menguji apakah komponen kontrol (ekonomi) dari keadilan prosedural memberi kontribusi yang signifikan dalam menjelaskan hubungan antara partisipasi anggaran dan komitmen anggaran dalam kondisi stretch budget. Mahasiswa melaksanakan tugas yang melibatkan keputusan penganggaran dasar. Tugas utama mereka adalah mengkode simbol sebanyak mungkin dalam sesi pekerjaan atas kondisi yang berbeda. Manipulasi suara, pilihan, dan jenis anggaran secara acak ditugaskan pada partisipan. Dua variabel dependen, judgment keadilan prosedural dan komitmen anggaran, diukur. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kombinasi suara dan pilihan mempengaruhi judgment keadilan prosedural. Dalam kondisi stretch budget, keadilan prosedural memiliki pengaruh mediasi dalam hubungan antara suara dan pilihan dan komitmen anggaran. Selain itu, studi ini menemukan bahwa dalam kondisi stretch budget, suara dan pilihan memiliki hubungan negatif dengan komitmen anggaran, hal tersebut menunjukkan bahwa partisipasi anggaran menciptakan masalah perilaku.

Interrelation of Controls for Autonomous Motivation: A Field Study of Productivity Gains Through Pressure-Induced Process Innovation

ABSTRACT This field study investigates an empirical setting where the introduction of new formal results controls—stretch targets for productivity that are seemingly unachievable with current process efficiencies—is associated with high productivity gains over extended periods of time. Contrary to findings from the prior management accounting research, employees meet the targets by being creative and risk-taking in continuously innovating processes, despite the pressure induced by high target-level difficulty. Mobilizing self-determination theory, we argue that a specific interrelation of personnel and cultural control with results control supports internalization of the latter by employees. In this situation, employees perceive the high performance required by the results control assimilated into their own values, which facilitates the autonomous motivation necessary for their creativity. Our findings contribute to the literature by identifying the conditions, and discovering the mechanisms, that enhance the efficacy of stretch targets.

BUDGETARY PARTICIPATION AND STRETCH TARGETS: PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS IN A STRETCH BUDGET CONDITION

Budgeting carries behavioral problems that can have important effects on the effectiveness of an organization. Budgetary participation generally refers to the extent to which subordinates participate in preparing the budget and influence the budget goals. The purpose of this research is to investigate whether control (economic) components of procedural justice provide a significant contribution in explaining the relation between budgetary participation and budget commitment in a stretch budget condition. College students perform a task involving basic budgeting decisions. Their main job is to decode symbols as many as possible in a work session under different conditions. Manipulations of voice, choice, and budget type are randomly assigned to the participants. Two dependent variables, procedural justice judgments and budget commitment are measured. The results show that voice and choice combine to influence procedural justice judgments. In a stretch budget condition, procedural justice has a mediating effect in the relations between voice and choice and budget commitment. Moreover, the study finds that in the stretch budget condition, voice and choice have negative relations with budget commitment, suggesting that budgetary participation creates a behavioral problem.

An Efficient Weighting Update Method to Achieve Acceptable Consistency Deviation in Analytical Target Cascading

Weighting coefficients are used in analytical target cascading (ATC) at each element of the hierarchy to express the relative importance of (a) matching targets passed from the parent element and (b) maintaining consistency of linking variables and consistency with designs achieved by subsystem child elements. Proper selection of weight values is crucial when the top-level targets are unattainable, for example when “stretch” targets are used. In this case, strict design consistency cannot be achieved with finite weights; however, it is possible to achieve arbitrarily small inconsistencies. This article presents an iterative method for finding weighting coefficients that achieve solutions within user-specified inconsistency tolerances and demonstrates its effectiveness with several examples. The method also led to reduced computational time in the demonstration examples.

An Efficient Weighting Update Method to Achieve Acceptable Consistency Deviation in Analytical Target Cascading

Weighting coefficients are used in Analytical Target Cascading (ATC) at each element of the hierarchy to express the relative importance of matching targets passed from the parent element and maintaining consistency of linking variables and consistency with designs achieved by subsystem child elements. Proper selection of weight values is crucial when the top level targets are unattainable, for example when “stretch” targets are used. In this case, strict design consistency cannot be achieved with finite weights; however, it is possible to achieve arbitrarily small inconsistencies. This article presents an iterative method for finding weighting coefficients that achieve solutions within user-specified inconsistency tolerances and demonstrates its effectiveness with several examples. The method also led to reduced computational time in the demonstration examples.

Referent Cognitions and Budgetary Fairness: A Research Note

This study examines the effects of fairness in budgeting on individual performance in a nonparticipative budgeting setting. An experiment was conducted in which subjects performed a production task and were compensated under a budget-based incentive contract. Performance was lowest when an unfair budget target was assigned using an unfair budgeting process. When the budget target assigned was fair, the fairness or unfairness of the budgeting process had no effect on performance. When an unfair budget target was determined using a fair budgeting process, mean performance was not significantly different from mean performance of the subjects assigned fair budget targets. Implications of this result in assigning stretch targets are discussed.