Strategic management accounting practices in Palestinian companies: application of contingency theory perspective

This study uses a quantitative methodology to explore the impact of contingency factors on use of strategic management accounting techniques (SMA), and combined impact of SMA Usage and contingency factors on organisational performance in a less developed country (LDC) context. The exploratory framework included two main dependent variables, namely SMA Usage and organisational performance. For the former, this study gauged the impact of perceived environmental uncertainty (competitive intensity and market turbulence), business strategy (prospector /defender), organisational structure (formalisation and decentralisation), organisational size and organisational technology on SMA Usage. For the latter, this study explored two dimensions of organisational performance (financial and non-financial) and how the conceptualised dimension(s) of organisational structure, SMA Usage, perceived environmental uncertainty and organisational strategy impact on performance. Data were collected from Palestinian large companies (cross sectors); was used to test the conceptualised framework. The analysis was based on 175 responses, representing a response rate of 43.75%. The SPSS package was used to confirm the reliability and validity of factors and also statistically estimated the association coefficients of the conceptualised relationships in the framework. The findings from this study suggest that the usage of SMA techniques is influenced by a number of factors. These are perceived environmental uncertainty (Market Turbulence) and organisational technology. Also, larger organisations tend to use more SMA techniques than smaller