Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, Executive-in-Residence with the Monash University Faculty of Arts and a former Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo.
Jennifer Justice is an Accountant with Kendall Sinclair Cowper & Daigle LLP in North Bay (Ontario) and a recent graduate from Nipissing University’s School of Business.
Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and Research Director for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada.
In a previous post we described why we are using the Accountancy work domain as our first proof-of-concept test of our Ladder of Opportunities framework for professional development in workplace innovation. Using innovation examples from research studies in Accountancy, our focus is on validating the framework on two dimensions:
Do the framework elements cover the range of innovation examples in Accountancy?
Are there Accountancy examples for each of the different framework elements?
We are also interested in identifying some of the context-specific issues to be addressed for the framework to be used in professional development for Workplace Innovation. We will be incorporating what we learn from our four planned work domain tests into revisions of the framework, before adapting our generic learning resources and case studies from higher education contexts for domain-specific professional development with our workplace partners.
In this post we describe specific examples for workplace innovation in the Accountancy work domain for the first two elements of our prototype framework: Job Crafting and Innovation Adaptation. A future post will add examples for Design Innovation and Intrepreneurship.
Job Crafting in Accountancy
Our laddered framework for workplace innovation opportunities suggests that employee capability[i] and experience with Job Crafting can be leveraged as a step to more complex innovation opportunities. We explore here two issues:
What do we know about the prevalence and impact of Job Crafting in Accountancy?
Are there off-the-shelf case stories for Accountancy-centred professional development?
Despite an apparent lack of formal training for accountants in Job Crafting, it appears that significant Job Crafting is occurring in the Accountancy work domain. While none of the classic studies on Job Crafting included mention of accountants, we did find two recent studies providing some evidence about the role of Job Crafting in Accountancy. The first set of evidence was from a small qualitative study[ii] with accountants in the Netherlands, which noted that “In recent years, research has been conducted about the relationship between job crafting and meaningful work. Yet, the field lacks in-depth information about this relationship for specific occupational groups. One of these groups is accountants and tax specialists.”
This study included self-reports of experiences with Job Crafting, including the classic forms of Task, Relational and Cognitive Crafting (although the Task Crafting consisted entirely of task selection, not task redesign) but did not venture into the newer area of Upskilling incorporated as Job Crafting. The results suggested a strong link between engaging in Job Crafting and experiencing accounting work as highly meaningful. Unfortunately, the only detailed case stories are from the few respondents who reported low levels of meaningful work and low or no Job Crafting.
The second set of evidence about Job Crafting specific to Accountancy comes from a study of accountants[iii] in the Italian city of Naples. The particular focus was on links between Cognitive Crafting and the accountants’ perceptions of their job security and the external perceptions of their profession; we can expect that both of these perceptions will be impacted by the changes in the profession outlined above.
Analysis of the structured discussions with individuals in this study showed that, “despite not being familiar with the concept of job crafting, interviewed accountants described various actions they used to cope [with the perceived threats] and…these actions resemble the cognitive job crafting dimension” as previously defined. The authors give particular consideration to cognitive job crafting in the context of the innovations changing the nature of accountancy work (and its associated prestige).
On the positive side, these studies provided evidence of Job Crafting amongst accountants, with or without that explicit label. Given the external pressures for innovation described above, it appears likely that more Job Crafting can be expected in the future, to adapt tasks to leverage the new technological tools for more routine rules-based tasks and to redirect accountants’ roles to broader managerial issues (with subsequent impacts on perceived prestige of the profession).
On the negative side, we did not find any engaging case stories – or raw material which we could weave into narrative form – which could be used as examples from the Accountancy work domain to supplement existing generic Job Crafting cases in our professional development resources for workplace innovation. We noted also that both studies provided evidence about the impact of Job Crafting on quality of accountants’ work life but did not address the complementary goal of workplace innovation – to directly enhance organizational performance.
Innovation Adaptation in Accountancy
Adapting innovations from elsewhere to ensure they reflect the local workplace context is an important form for employee engagement in workplace innovation. The most thorough investigations of employee-led Innovation Adaptation have occurred in Healthcare[iv], Social Services[v] and Education[vi], where the effectiveness of an innovation can be critically affected by the ways local context affects the social relationships with patients, clients and users. In other settings for Innovation Adaptation in more technical domains, similar roles for employees in adapting innovations in accordance with local workplace factors have been documented in work domains such as Software Development[vii] and Manufacturing[viii]. Accountancy appears to share some aspects of employee-led Innovation Adaptation with both service providers to diverse client groups and product providers with highly technical and rules-based processes.
In our preliminary scan of case studies of Innovation Adaptation in Accountancy, the following aspects stood out as potential distinctive elements:
In case stories of innovation in the big multi-national accounting firms[ix], there was very little attention paid to how local contexts affected deployment and adaptation.
In case stories of innovation by internal firm-based accounting staff, for example in Internal Audit[x] and Enterprise Resource Planning[xi], we found the reporting focused more on the external sources of knowledge used by local adopters/adapters rather than the employee-led adaptations per se.
One exception to these limitations with more “on-the-ground” reporting was a case story of Accrual Accounting[xii] – an accounting method where revenue or expenses are recorded when a transaction occurs rather than when payment is received or made – adapted from its use in the corporate sector to suit the needs of European public sector agencies. (The case study we examined was a study of the adaptation by the regional government in Campania, Italy.)
“This study…of accounting in action…examines how practitioners shape an accrual accounting system from its initial stage of implementation…The accounting in action approach…allows a closer scrutiny of the influence of practitioners in shaping reforms.”
The case study authors drew on previous work that “revealed the manner in which expectations of explicitness in accounting can translate [in practice] into the emergence of gray areas, with new problems and controversies over the exact nature of change, as what appears to be exact is rendered imprecise.”
“[A]n accrual accounting system undergoes its construction through mutation and alteration…The results reveal an elaborate process of improvisation and fabrication in the design of this accounting system and a fragile network in action.”
We treated these conclusions of the study as a demonstration that ongoing Innovation Adaptation was occurring in the Accountancy work domain, although perhaps hidden from view. Given the growing importance of Innovation in Accountancy, we hope to see more such case stories to provide a clearer view of the professional development needs in Innovation Adaptation capability for accountants.
This project was supported in part by a grant from eCampus Ontario’s Virtual Learning System program.
References:
[i] Bruning, P. F., & Campion, M. A. (2021). Assessing job crafting competencies to predict tradeoffs between competing outcomes. Human Resource Management.
[ii] Mattijssen, A. (2020). The contribution of job crafting to meaningful work for accountants and task specialists. Master’s thesis, Radbout University Nijmegen.
[iii] Buonocore, F., de Gennaro, D., Russo, M., & Salvatore, D. (2020). Cognitive job crafting: A possible response to increasing job insecurity and declining professional prestige. Human Resource Management Journal, 30(2), 244-259.
[iv] E.g., Ploeg J, Wong ST, Hassani K, Yous M-L, Fortin M, Kendall C, Liddy C, Markle-Reid M, Petrovic B, Dionne E, Scott CM, Wodchis WP. (2019) Contextual factors influencing the implementation of innovations in community-based primary health care: the experience of 12 Canadian research teams. Primary Health Care Research & Development 20(e107): 1–13.
[v] E.g., Bonell, C., Prost, A., Melendez-Torres, G. J., Davey, C., & Hargreaves, J. R. (2021). Will it work here? A realist approach to local decisions about implementing interventions evaluated as effective elsewhere. J Epidemiol Community Health, 75(1), 46-50.
[vi] E.g., Dede, C. (2006). Scaling up: Evolving Innovations beyond ideal settings to challenging contexts of practice. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), Handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 551–566). Cambridge, UK: University Press.
[vii] E.g., Nilsson, A., Castro, L. M., Rivas, S., & Arts, T. (2015). Assessing the effects of introducing a new software development process: a methodological description. International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer, 17(1), 1-16.
[viii] E.g., Soliman, M., & Saurin, T. A. (2020). Lean-as-imagined differs from lean-as-done: the influence of complexity. Production Planning & Control, 1-18.
[ix] Rychlik, M. (2018). Innovation in the Audit Profession and How it is Changing the World of Accounting. Honors Thesis, Oklahoma State University. https://shareok.org/handle/11244/317160
[x] Lhuillery, S., Tellechea, M., & Thiery, S. (2021). Open innovation in managerial innovation: the case of internal audit (No. 2021-19). Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
[xi] Scarbrough, H., Robertson, M., & Swan, J. (2015). Diffusion in the face of failure: The evolution of a management innovation. British Journal of Management, 26(3), 365-387.
[xii] Bruno, A. and Lapsley, I. (2018), "The emergence of an accounting practice: The fabrication of a government accrual accounting system", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 1045-1066. Bruno, A. (2020). New Public Management (NPM) and the Introduction of an Accrual Accounting System: A Case Study of an Italian Regional Government Authority. Springer Nature.