Enabling and Coercive Formalization
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2017-07-13
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en
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This master thesis focusses on the balance between enabling and coercive formalization at the audit department of a big four accounting firm. Formalization is the extent of written rules, procedures and instructions governing employees activities. Coercive formalization means that organizational rules have the purpose to produce a foolproof system. On the other hand, enabling formalization takes into account the intelligence of the workers by designing the organizational rules. Based on the paper of Adler and Borys (1996), four design principles (repair, internal transparency, global transparency and flexibility) are used during this thesis to answer the research question: How does a big four accounting firm balance enabling and coercive formalization? By means of a case study including interviews with respondents from different layers and observations, it could be concluded that characteristics of both enabling and coercive formalization exists at the investigated big four accounting firm. Results show that repair and internal transparency contain more enabling characteristics, while the design principles global transparency and flexibility contain more coercive characteristics
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen