Management Control in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Indirect Control Forms, Control Combinations and their Effect on Company Performance

Management control is one of the key management functions, but has been rarely addressed in academic research. Amongst other reasons, this disinterest might be rooted in the typically negative connotation of the term ‘control’. Academics rather prefer topics like strategy development, planning or organizational topics over control. Paradoxically, academics and managers both are highly interested and concerned with visions, strategies and plans; however, the majority of them fail or are not implemented successfully. One of the key reasons for this is the fact that the implementation and the subsequent control conducted by managers are often neglected. Managers could delegate the execution of plans and strategies to their subordinates; however, they have to take into consideration which activities can be delegated and how the progress should be controlled. Neither science nor practice has been able to provide acceptable answers to this open issue; thus there is a significant research gap. The research gap in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is even larger – control here has been explored only in a considerably small number of studies. In the setting of small and medium-sized enterprises previous research has already demonstrated that management control is of greater importance than planning activities. This highlights the relevance of the research problem on how control should be executed in SMEs again.