Melanie Lu­cia Feldhues

My research is driven by curiosity and an interest in contemporary or novel phenomena in accounting. Especially in the context of my field research projects, I engage with practitioners from different firms or organizations to bridge academia and practice. By interacting with practitioners, insights into research are gained. At the same time, practitioners receive direct insights and sparring from academia. The following three examples illustrate this approach:  

In a field study conducted during the Covid pandemic, we investigated working from home (WFH) and management control practices. WFH can drastically limit the control options that managers can rely on, particularly behavior control and informal control, shifting emphasis to outcome control. The insight into concrete control challenges and remedies from a leader’s perspective helps create awareness regarding control alternatives and may inspire experimenting with different combinations of outcome, behavior, and informal control to identify a firm’s optimal WFH arrangement. The study contributes to the ongoing debate about (hybrid) work arrangements that a multitude of firms all over the world are facing since the Covid pandemic.  

Employee development and retention is a key challenge in the Danish audit industry. To gain insights into drivers of auditors´ motivation, job satisfaction, and career ambitions, we collected data in the field from different sources to be able to contribute to this debate. While the research project is ongoing, we disseminated selected findings in articles targeted at practitioners to foster awareness and debate about practices such as mentoring or career development, the role of professional and organizational identification, or job design elements perceived as relevant by Danish auditors.  

Little emphasis has been placed on employees’ preferences for different types of targets or the associated performance accountability. Yet, these preferences may be consequential for the motivational effects elicited by performance targets, which may influence not only performance, but also such factors as job satisfaction, engagement, and employee retention which have important societal implications. To gain insights into this question, we relied on data collected in the field to investigate the antecedents of employee target preferences in their natural context. Our analysis in the natural context shows how team leaders’ distribution of team and individual performance information contributes to the shaping of team norms that influence team members’ control preferences.