Proceedings

of SEM as the main data analysing procedure to overcome some previous statistical
problems in this kind of researches as well as opening a new avenue for Iranian
researchers (as this technique is not well-known in Iran) are the main methodological
contributions of this study. In term of theoretical, this research contributes by several
points such as investigating about dissemination of knowledge concerning
management accounting and performance management in developing countries
(Hopper et al., 2008), extending and testing the contingency postulates in public
sector organizations particularly in Higher Education of a developing country
(Chenhall, 2003), acting as one of the rare studies that broadened contingency notions
from the accounting area to the performance management realm (Cuganesan and
Donovan, 2011), and explicitly proposing and testing “financial pressure” in term of
budget constraint as a new contingent variable (Chenhall, 2003, Abdel-Kader and
Luther, 2008) as well as proposing it as a hindering antecedents for participative
budgeting (Shields and Shields, 1998).
Finally, policymakers in Iran’s Higher Education can use the outcome of this research
to understand the extent of success in implementation of new reform in Iran Higher
Education and justify the priority of decentralization to the centralized decisionmaking
concerning the universities’ activities as well as the consequences of
participative budgeting on the performance of universities. In addition, universities’
management also may learn some lessons from this study such as implementing
participative budgeting at least at internal level, doing more amendments in their
reward system, and design and use of broader range of performance measures for
evaluating the performance of their employees rather than relying just on traditional
measures such as punctuality or length of presence at the workplace.
Care should be taken for use of the results of this study due to some limitations such
as the problems related to questionnaire-based studies, relatively small sample size (as
SEM needs larger sample size), not including all variables affecting universities’
performance such as strategy and political environment, and ignorance of students’
perspective. In the future, many replications could be undertaken in this matter in Iran
or other developing country’s context. Moreover undertaking a qualitative research
methodology could increase the understandings around the result of this study and
may add to the robustness of these findings. In this research just three department of
the universities, namely Education, Research, and Financial Divisions were
investigated, future studies could take into the account the Students Affair Division
and look at the students’ perspective too.
REFERENCES
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