preview

Critically Evaluate Roi and Eva Encourages Short Term Decision Making in Managers

Best Essays

PART A

INTRODUCTION OF PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

Growing global competition has affected the organisational structure. Companies have moved to divisional structure, which generates the need for top management to assess the divisional performance. Divisions tend to be categorised into either a profit centre or an investment centre. While some measure of profit is used to measure the performance of profit centres, for investment centres many firms employ measures that are based on profit and invested capital(McGraw-Hill Higher Education).

C. Drury (2008) argues that performance measurement is one of the key functions of management accounting. Neely, Adams & Kennerly (2002) has defined performance measurement as the following: …show more content…

In other words, the company has created wealth. If the value of EVA is negative, the company is consuming capital, rather than generating wealth. A company’s goal is to have positive and increasing EVA. Thus, EVA is used to focus manager’s attention on creating value for shareholders, by earnings profits greater than the firm’s cost of capital.

The use of EVA does have its downside. EVA does not control for size differences across plants or divisions (Hansen & Mowen, 1997; Horngren, et al., 1997). A larger plant or division will tend to have a higher EVA relative to its smaller counterparts. EVA is a computed number that relies on financial accounting methods of revenue realisation and expense recognition. If motivated to do so, managers can manipulate these numbers by altering their decision-making processes (Horngren, et al., 1997). EVA is short term oriented and results oriented.

From the above analysis, I agree, “Both ROI and EVA, when used as performance measures in an organisation, encourage managers to be short-term in their focus and decision-making”.

Addressing the dysfunctional consequences of short-term financial performance measures, the following measures can be adopted to overcome: 1. Divisional performance evaluated on the basis of

Get Access