SAF professor receives best paper award on study in knowledge sharing amongst employees

Tuesday, January 11, 2022
Patty Mah, Associate Director, Communications and External Relations

Photo of Associate Professor Krista Fiolleau
School of Accounting and Finance Associate Professor Krista Fiolleau, PhD and her co-authors Leslie Berger, PhD and Carolyn MacTavish, PhD Associate Professors at Wilfrid Laurier, were awarded the Best Paper Award from the Journal of Management Accounting Research (JMAR).

The Journal for Management Accounting Research is published by the American Accounting Association (AAA), the largest community of accountants in academia. Through its membership, leading-edge research, and publications, the AAA help to shape the future of accounting in expanding contributions to address key issues for scholarship, education, and practice. The JMAR Best Paper Award is presented annually to the JMAR paper deemed to have the greatest potential impact on management accounting research.

The award-winning paper, “I know something you don’t know: The effect of relative performance information and the individual performance incentives on knowledge sharing,” expands our understanding of counterproductive effects of knowledge sharing within a workplace that implements incentive systems and performance enhancing tools. In environments where sharing information between employees is useful, tools such as relative performance information (RPI) and individual performance incentives, can lead to losses in efficiency when employees choose not to share information or choose to share inaccurate information. The paper suggests that it may be useful for an organization to monitor metrics other than simply output performance effects when implementing tools to measure collaboration and sharing behaviour of their employees. The paper was originally published in the Summer 2019 volume of the Journal of Management Accounting Research.

Prof. Fiolleau is an associate professor with the School of Accounting and Finance at the University of Waterloo. An accredited Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA), Prof. Fiolleau’s research interests include accounting ethics, ethical reasoning, and use of accounting information in decision-making.