Enabling and coercive management control systems and organizational resilience

ABSTRACT This study examines the impacts of enabling and coercive management control systems (MCSs) on organizational resilience, in the cognitive, behavioral, and contextual dimensions. Research on resilience has sought to identify elements capable of improving organizational resilience capacity, and enabling and coercive MCSs may shed new light on this discussion. Understanding the role of MCSs in the creation and use of resilience capacities can help explain why some organizations manage to outperform others in situations of adverse and turbulent events. The literature has focused on enabling MCSs and adopts the premise that, in general, the use of coercive controls is negatively perceived. However, the results of the research show that enabling and coercive MCSs coexist in companies, and that coercive controls do not have a negative influence on resilience, even showing a positive association with the contextual dimension. A survey was conducted in companies that bought and/or were acquired by others, according to PwC Brazil’s Mergers and Acquisitions report, and the sample consists of 144 managers from different organizational areas of these companies who answered the questionnaire sent via Survey Monkey. The structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was applied to test the hypotheses. The study presents evidence that MCSs constitute antecedents of resilience capacity in organizations. This suggests that the design and use of MCSs may favor the development of capacities to deal with turbulences and unexpected events in advance.