The budgeting climate concept and its application to case organizations’ budgeting—an explorative study

Abstract

This paper introduces the budgeting climate concept and applies it to the case organizations’ budgeting in order to understand the connections between budgeting activity and human behavior in their organizational and social context. The empirical phase comprised a longitudinal case study covering 13 years undertaken in a profit center's sales organizations in the Finnish parent company of a large international industry group. The concept of the budgeting climate constructed in the theoretical part of this study proved to be relevant to behavioral budgeting research as it enables a study of elements decisive for budgeting practice in combination. Using the budgeting climate concept makes it possible to interpret and understand, at least in part, the reasons for the contradictory results achieved by traditional quantitative behavioral research on budgeting.