Management Accounting Techniques and Operational Performance: A Critical Global Literature Review

Abstract

Management commitment is the organisational mechanism through which This article critically examines the global literature on management accounting techniques and operational performance. It challenges the widespread but overly linear claim that adopting costing, budgeting, performance measurement, and strategic analysis techniques necessarily improves efficiency, quality, flexibility, innovation, and delivery. Drawing on an integrative reading of foundational and recent research, the review synthesises four streams: traditional planning and control techniques, strategic and non-financial techniques, digitally enabled management accounting, and sustainability-oriented accounting. Across these streams, positive associations are common, but the causal evidence is weaker than the volume of supportive findings suggests. Much of the literature is cross-sectional, based on managers’ self-reports, and framed at the firm level even though accounting practices and operational outcomes frequently operate at process, plant, team, and product levels. The review argues that management accounting should be understood as an information-use capability rather than a portfolio of installed tools. Operational gains depend on configurational fit among technique sophistication, information quality, managerial competence, behavioural use, organisational strategy, technological infrastructure, and environmental uncertainty. Misfit can generate dysfunctional target pressure, information overload, gaming, rigidity, and high implementation costs. The article develops an integrative framework in which management accounting techniques influence operational performance through decision quality, organisational learning, resource discipline, and coordination, while context and managerial competence condition those mechanisms. It concludes with a global research agenda centred on longitudinal and multilevel designs, objective operational data, under-represented emerging economies and agro-processing sectors, and explicit investigation of failure, abandonment, and unintended consequences.