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Divisional Performance Evaluation

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Divisional Performance Evaluation

Overview:- Most large Organisations adopt divisionalised structures. The manner in which divisional performance is controlled and measured is, therefore, of particular importance. A central issue of performance reporting is whether divisional managers should be held accountable for items that they cannot influence by their actions. The conventional wisdom of management accounting, as reflected in textbooks, advocates that the evaluation of a manager’s performance should consist of only those factors under a manager’s control. Therefore, divisional managerial performance measures should include only the items controllable by divisional managers. Or, performance measurement should …show more content…

This knowledge is difficult or impossible to aggregate; time and place by their very nature are destroyed by aggregation. Specific knowledge is also often obtained at low cost by individuals in an organization as a byproduct of other activities, for example, the idiosyncratic knowledge about a machine that its operator gains over time. Prices and quantities are examples of general knowledge that are easily aggregated and are inexpensive to transmit among agents.

Achieving effective utilization of information in decision-making is a major problem in organizations. The literature in computers and information systems views the problem as one of finding ways to transfer knowledge relevant to a decision to the agents involved in the decision. This makes sense when the knowledge is general or when the problem is one of discovering new techno logy that will convert specific to general knowledge. When the relevant knowledge, however, is specific, and when the technology (for example, in computing and communications) is unable to lower the cost of transfer substantially, this approach will fail.

The alternative to moving the knowledge is to move the decision rights to those agents who possess the relevant specific knowledge. The cost incurred in this approach to the problem is the cost engendered by the fact that people are self- interested. Therefore, as the decision rights are partitioned out among agents in the

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