The Relationship Between Budgetary Evaluation, Organizational Decentralization and Firm’s Performance

Certainly, the use of the achievement of budgetary objectives as a criterion for evaluating individual performance of managers (budgetary evaluation) is considered a controversial subject. It has been the subject of some research studies to understand its diversity and its impact on firm's performance. In this context, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, it tests the impact of organizational decentralization on budgetary evaluation practices. Second, it investigates the contribution of budgetary evaluation in firms' global performance improvement according to organizational decentralization. Data were collected from 62 Moroccan firms, operating in different industries, via a questionnaire survey. Based on descriptive statistics and some statistical tests (linear regressions), the study results show that organizational decentralization has a positive significant impact on budgetary evaluation, implying that “strict” budgetary evaluation especially based on the achievement of budgetary targets in individual performance evaluation is adopted more by decentralized firms. In addition, the firms’ global performance is significantly and positively impacted by the budgetary evaluation in decentralized companies. This relationship is not significant in centralized firms. Among the implications of this study, we can highlight that its results are very useful for companies’ managers. The use of a “strict” budgetary evaluation is more suitable for decentralized firms. While centralized companies are indifferent between adopting “strict” and “flexible” budgetary valuation.