Research Interest

Topics

Biography

Carla Mendoza is Professor in the Management Control Department at  ESCP Europe Paris Campus. Her teaching areas are Cost Accounting, Responsibility Accounting and Management Control.
After graduating from HEC with a Master in Management, she joined Bossard Consultants, a Consultancy firm specialized in Strategy and Organization. She earned her Ph.D. from HEC in 1991 and became professor at ESCP Europe. In 2001, she obtained her DHDR from University of Sophia Antipolis.
Her teaching activities are shared between the “Grande Ecole”, the MBA and Executive programs. She is also responsible of the “Cost Accounting and Decision Making” course.
Her research includes the links between ABC and ABM, strategic tableaux de bord and balanced scorecards, the implementation of the Controllability Principle and the use of Budgeting as a Performance Evaluation System.

Current research

The controllability principle: a study of managers’ opinions
The controllability principle, which stipulates that managers should only be evaluated based on elements that they can control, has been widely studied in the management control literature, both from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It is based on the idea that the principle leads to better satisfaction of the managers through the neutralization of uncontrollable items in their performance assessment, because it brings fairness in the evaluation. However, the position of the managers evaluated has not been much examined. We do not know much about the relationship between the controllability principle, fairness and managerial satisfaction. Do managers think the controllability principle leads to fairness and, eventually, satisfaction? Do managers always wish the controllability principle to be applied? And why?

The use of budgeting in high Perceived Environmental Uncertainty (PEU) contexts
One of the main mechanisms that companies use to control their managers is Management By Objectives. Such systems typically involve individual objectives established for each manager, and performance evaluation systems which are based exclusively on achievement of objectives. However, this mechanism relies on two assumptions: first it assumes that defining ambitious but realistic objectives for each manager is always possible and second that, at the end of the year, these objectives represent a reliable reference for evaluating their performance.
Companies that rely on this control mechanism, have encountered two types of difficulties: 1) if there is too much pressure from the top, managers can be given objectives which are too difficult to attain, resulting in jeopardising their motivation and performance; 2) if a manager’s results are affected by unforeseen events during the year, it becomes more difficult to use objectives initially defined as a basis for performance evaluation.
Sales is the ideal field to examine how management by objectives is used in situations in which managers are required to achieve objectives even when confronted with uncontrollable external factors.
In particular, the two following questions are to be examined:
How do sales executives deal with situations in which there is high pressure to achieve objectives?
How do companies manage the achievement (or non-achievement) of sales quotas? Is it the most decisive factor in performance evaluation for sales executives?

Publications