The diffusion of management control systems in Italy: A comparison between family and non-family firms

Abstract

The current economic crisis has accentuated the purchasing power loss and the decrease of companies’ profitability; so, the strategic planning and management control systems become needful because they provide managers the tools to drive the whole organization towards established goals. For this reason, the research is focused on the use and the diffusion of advanced management control systems within a sample of Italian companies, both family firms (FFs) and non-family firms (NFFs). The research aims at investigating the diffusion of performance measurement systems within the sample of Italian FFs and NFFs and at analysing which kind of advanced managerial tools are more widespread. The research has been conducted using the method of questionnaire in order to photograph the state of the art in a significant number of Italian firms. The expected outcomes are that the most developed strategic planning and management control systems are still not widespread within the sample of small and medium enterprises. In addition, we also suppose that performance measurement systems are more widespread in NFFs than in FFs due to the significant presence of the family in company’s running and a related lower power of managers.