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Reseach on the Impact of Religion Bias on Performance Evaluation

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1. Introduction One of the fundamental purposes of management accounting and control research is to motivate employees to operate for the firm’s interest. It is clear that incentives affect overall performance, and thus, managers and accountants by providing monetary incentives and compensation systems aim to improve their employees’ performance. However, the inequity is produced by the design of compensation contracts and by managers’ performance evaluation biases, is perceived to be one of the main problems of firm’s prosperity. A large theoretical literature, based on agency theory, has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts make employees to do their best for the firm. Therefore, firms include many different mechanisms (i.e. piece rates, options, bonuses and stocks, budget targets) in their compensation contracts to align interests between the employees and their managers. However, objective measures are not perfect and using only these is unlikely to be the most effective way to motivate employees (Feltham & Xie 1994; Hemmer 1996). Financial measures provoke a reallocation of activities toward those that are directly compensated and away from the uncompensated activities, known as multitasking problem (Holmstrom & Milgrom, 1990, Baker 1992). They have been criticized for promoting over-emphasis on short-turn financial results, and thus, they sacrifice long-turn (Ittner et al., 1997, 2003). Moreover, financial measures of performance tend to be noisy

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