The dysfunctional consequences of budgetary controls have received a great deal of attention. One motivation for the current study was to test whether effects exist between two alleged dysfunctional consequences of a rigid budgetary control form: budget slack creation and managerial short-term orientation. According to the research: A rigid budgetary control will reduce budget slack creation and increase managerial short-term orientation. Reducing one form of dysfunctional behavior (slack creation) through rigid controls seems to raise another form (stronger management focus on business matters that affect short-term results). However, the budgetary control forms that organizations implement may be affected by two important antecedents: past business unit performance and environmental uncertainty. The results indicate that business units that have been more profitable are subject to more rigid budgetary controls, which reduce the propensity to build slack and, as a result, lead indirectly to managers¡¦ emphasis on short-term effects. The high environmental uncertainty of the business units is subject to less rigid budgetary controls from upper management allowing them to build slack, which seems in line with the flexibility required to respond effectively to changes in their environment as well as the tendency for managers to think about long-term effects. We collected 138 samples from 1,017 respondents, who are business unit managers of public owned companies in Taiwan, and used path analysis to test our hypotheses.

Most previous studies emphasized on the single consequence with respect to the effect of budgetary emphasis on budgetary slack or other dysfunctional behaviors, however, the relationships among these dysfunctional behaviors are seldom investigated. In order to understand the relationships among those dysfunctional behaviors, this study attempted to explore a structure model of past performance, perceived environment uncertainty, consideration leadership style, budgetary emphasis and three dysfunctional behaviors including budgetary slack, job-related tension and managerial short-term orientation. The empirical data was randomly drawn from 175 manufacturing managers in Taiwan Security Exchange. The empirical evidence of this research revealed as follows: 1. Managers have no incentive to create budgetary slack in a business which does not evaluate manager¡¦s performance with budgetary goal achievement. There is a significant positive relationship between past performance and budgetary slack, but the direct effect does not exist. The effect of past performance on budgetary slack is indirectly through budgetary emphasis. Similarly, perceived environment uncertainty and consideration leadership style affecting budgetary slack isn¡¦t directly but indirectly by budgetary emphasis. 2. Between budgetary slack and managerial short-term orientation, budgetary slack and job-related tension may exist a spillover effect. While reducing the propensity to build budgetary slack might induce managerial short-term orientation and job-related tension. 3. Weather no matter budget achievement evaluates performance, past performance directly influences the job-related tension. The manager whose performance is poor could have the higher job-related tension. 4. In different industry, the factor that influencing the organization to practice the budget control system is also different. In traditional industry, past performance is the important factor that affecting organization to implement the budget control system and induce the dysfunction behaviors, but perceived environment uncertainty is the important factor in the electronic information industry.