How do management accountants add value to business? A multiple-role model

Abstract

This paper reviews the extant literature to develop a value-centred multiple-role framework for management accountants (MAs) as business partners and, more importantly, to explain how these roles can coexist and evolve through dynamic pathways that generate different forms of value. Drawing on leading English-language accounting journals, supplemented by relevant books and professional reports, the paper uses role theory to map the variables examined in prior studies through a Marimekko chart and integrates the MA and human resource (HR) business partnership literatures to develop a multiple-role framework for MAs. The findings are fourfold: (i) a comprehensive mapping of the variables and models used in prior research to investigate MAs’ roles; (ii) a classification of existing models of MA role evolution into four typologies; (iii) a novel multiple-role framework of MAs as business partners comprising four role archetypes (bookkeeper, performance officer, business advisor, and strategic partner); and (iv) three dynamic pathways (role specialisation, role replacement, and role expansion) through which MAs adopt and combine one or more role archetypes. The application of role theory complements prior studies that provide fragmented evidence on MAs’ roles. By integrating the MA and HR business partnership literatures, the paper suggests that MAs may simultaneously enact, and move across, multiple business-partner role archetypes depending on how they create substantive, rather than merely declared, value for other managers. In doing so, the framework also contributes to the debate on hybridisation by conceptualising hybrid MA roles as evolving multiple-role configurations in which control- and business-oriented behaviours may coexist, generating tensions between independence and involvement that are continuously negotiated through interactions with organisational counterparts. Overall, the paper highlights the inherent complexity of MAs’ business partnerships.