Financial AccountabiliQ &3 Managmcnf, 2(4), Winter 1986 0267 4424 $2.50 T H E USE OF RATIONAL SYSTEMS IN BOUNDED RATIONALITY ORGANIZATIONS: A DILEMMA FOR FINANCIAL MANAGERS PHILIP BROMILEY AND K.J. EUSKE* INTRODUCTION It has been decades since financial managers were trained to believe that employees and organizations could be handled as if everyone was a simple rational cog in a big machine. Cognitive limits to rationality, motivational theories, leadership, and human relations theories are all based on deviations from the simple rational model of man. Yet management technology is still dominated heavily by systems which are fundamentally based on the assumptions of economic rationality. If people and organizations differ from the implicit assumptions of a manage- ment technique, managers should be seriously concerned that the technique is not producing the outcomes promised and may in fact be producing harmful outcomes which are not anticipated by the providers of the technology. Management techniques such as Planning, Programming, and Budgeting Systems (PPBS), Management by Objectives (MBO), and Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) rest upon the rational model. While studies in the manage- ment and accounting literature have analyzed the appropriateness of some of these techniques (c.f., Jablonsky and Dirsmith, 1978; Dirsmith and Jablonsky, 1979a; and Dirsmith and Jablonsky, 1979b) and, more generally, the rational model (Staw, 1980) in various environments, rationally-based techniques continue to be adopted regardless of the empirical assessment of their desirability. Years after the US federal government had discarded PPBS, other govern- ments continued to adopt it. Zero-based budgeting swept through the USA just as PPBS did with many organizations adopting it without evidence of its utility in their environment. MBO systems have received mixed evaluations - partially resulting from differences in the techniques and values used in evaluating the systems Uablonsky and Dirsmith, 1979a). However, MBO systems are still actively being implemented. For instance, in 1979 the US Army implemented what is essentially an MBO system for officer performance appraisal. Since all such systems have implementation and operations costs as well as some potential impact on performance of the organization, their appropriateness is of critical importance to the government manager. 'The authors are respectively, from the Department of Strategic Management and Organization, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Department of Administrative Sciences, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. They gratefully acknowledge partial support for the development of this paper from the NPS Foundation.