Factors influencing the performance of activity based costing teams: a field study of ABC model development time in the automobile industry
1- What is the research objective of the article?
The main objective of this article is to study how the different variables explained by the text affect the final outcome of the company. This study is in charge of demonstrating how can the ABC implementation; used by a large group of companies, could make the main objective of your company more efficient.
2- Are there any hypothesis or research question the autor/s define/s?
The author has research data from ABC developers of 18 ABC teams in two US auto manufacturers “Companies A and B”.
There are some hypothesis that are explained through the text. The first one could be that in charge on the resolution of the internal conflicts. The next one explains how the level of competition can increase, so that they should also increase the ABC`s training and team size. Following the branch of the team, there is also a reflection on the team cohesion; and this leads to the ABC model complexity.
3- Explain the methodology used
While studying the methodology used in order to obtain conclusions about the ABC model, it was necessary to set some variables from the perspective of an automobile manufacturer:
· Competition – is an external environment attributed. Competition is operationalized according to whether the plant is a core or non-core plant. A core plant is considered to have little competition because much capital investment by the corporation has been made and it sells most of what it produces. A non-core plant might make items incidental to manufacturing the automobile such as components; therefore, competition is high and price-based.
· ABC Training – is part of the team inputs. Training in ABC is thought to increase the level of significance people put on the ABC modelling task. Training is operationalized as