Using management control to align organizational startegies

USING MANAGEMENT CONTROL TO ALIGN ORGANIZATIONAL STARTEGIES AND TO MEASURE PERFORMANCES Pete Ştefan Babes-Bolyai University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 58-60, Teodor Mihali Street, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Email: stefan.pete@econ.ubbcluj.ro; Tel: 0264-418658 Popa Irimie Emil Babes-Bolyai University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 58-60, Teodor Mihali Street,Cluj-Napoca, Romania Email: irimie.popa@econ.ubbcluj.ro; Tel: 0264-418652, int. 5806 Volkán Ildikó Réka Babes-Bolyai University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 58-60, Teodor Mihali Street, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Email: v_reka@yahoo.com; Tel: 0264-418652, int. 5808
Practice shows that, in order to improve internal and external communication, managers need to increase the requestof information about their business administration. So, for this, they need a complementary system which assures them this kind of information and data. The related actions in this way are: forecast and control. Management control appeared as an answer to the evolving concerns toward economic efficiency and represents a privileged tool of management, defined as the process through which managersassures themselves that the resources are acquired and used with efficiency, efficaciousness and pertinence for realizing the objectives of an organization. Keywords management control, strategy, performance JEL Classification: M - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting

1. INTRODUCTION The American Accounting Association defined accounting in 1966 as the process ofidentifying, measuring and communicating economic information to permit informed judgments and decisions by users of the information. This definition is important because it recognizes that: -accounting is a process which main preoccupation is to capture business events, record their financial effect, summarize and report the result of those effects. -it is concerned with economic information,both financial and non-financial and its purpose is to support ―informed judgments and decision‖ by users in order to record, report and interpret business transactions. Meanwhile accounting is seen as fulfilling three functions: 1. Scorekeeping – capturing, recording, summarizing and reporting financial performance. 2. Attention- directing - drawing the attention of managers to, and assisting in theinterpretation of, business performance, particularly in terms of the comparison between actual and planned performance. 3. Problem-solving – identifying the best choice from a range of alternative actions. The attention-directing and problem-solving functions are taking place through three inter-related functions:  Planning – refers to establishing goals and strategies to achieve goals. Decision-making – using financial information to make decisions  Control – using financial information to maintain performance as close as possible to plans.

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The mentioned inter-related functions are important and relevant as increasingly businesses have been decentralized into many business units and managers need financial and non-financial information to develop and implement strategiesfor the future; making good decisions about products, services and their prices; and ensuring that plans are put into action and are achieved. This can be done by management accounting and management control. 2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY This article is a theoretical study and its purpose is to present the relationship between management control, performances and strategy using information and datagathered from the existing literature on national and international level. After covering the available literature in this field, based on a qualitative analysis, we want to demonstrate in this article that management control becomes an effective informational system and assures organizational coordination and development, capable to answer to 3 basic questions: What for?, For who? and On who? The...