Participative Budgeting Effects on Doctor-Managers’ Well-Being

Doctors heading Operational Units in Public Health care Organizations (PHOs), as budget holders, have become fundamental actors for the effective functioning of the budgeting planning and control systems. However, the hybridization of doctor-manager’s role and the predominant influence of their original clinical culture may cause them a lack of budgetary goal clarity, setting limits to the usefulness of the information neutrally provided by such systems for supporting their decision-making. This perceived ambiguity of budgetary goals may cause doctor-managers’ adverse reactions, which negatively influence their well-being at work, re-proposing the advantages of a greater integration of “behavioural” perspectives into the “structuralist” ones within the approaches to management control, also in PHOs’ context. Searching for such integrated approaches to budgeting systems, health care literature developing the behavioural perspective in some lines of interpretative research suggest to enhancing the patterns of doctor-managers’ cooperation with PHOs’ controllers and top management. Within the lines of Behavioural Management Accounting (BMA) research, based on the assumptions of Person-Organization Fit Theory, this paper explores the influence of participative budgeting on doctor-managers’ goal clarity and well-being at work. This model was tested through questionnaires from 332 doctor-managers of Italian PHOs. Findings show that participative budgeting positively influence doctor-managers’ goal clarity, which, in turn, increases well-being at work, and the mediating role of goal clarity in such relation. Our study contributes to the BMA research on the budgeting practices in PHOs context, shedding a light on doctor-managers’ well-being effects of participative budgeting.