Accounting for Management Control in Large Libyan Companies

The study gives an account of management control practices in Libya during a period of relative political and economic stability that preceded the 2011 war and regime change. Using a two-level contingency model and survey data, stepped mediation regression first ascertains contingency relationships between organisational variables and management control system (MCS) effectiveness. We also explicitly focus on the mediating role of management accounting information (MAI) in MCS effectiveness. We find that centralisation, formalisation, environmental uncertainty and competitive strategy significantly influence MCS effectiveness. Full mediation is observed in relation to centralisation, whereas partial mediation is detected for formalisation, environmental uncertainty, and competitive strategy. Manufacturing process complexity is not present in first level relationships and further tests only yielded an indirect MAI effect, not mediation in this case. The full vs. partial mediation distinction is not evident in most previous MCS interaction research, nor is the isolation of the indirect effect, and future research needs to explore this with larger samples. This is possibly the first study to develop and apply a multi-level contingency model that explicitly focuses on the mediating role of MAI to empirically examine MCS effectiveness and contributes to the nascent literature on management accounting in emerging economies.