Budgeting Slack, Social Pressure, and Autonomous Behavior in Experiment Relationship

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of improper social pressure on business unit controller’s inclination to create budgetary slack in the setting of organizational justice in the form of distributive and procedural justice. The creation of budgetary slack in this study is related to produce lower ROI target compared with actual ROI target that can be achieved by business unit. Furthermore, this study also examines the impact of Autonomous Motivation on the causality of social pressure, organizational justice, and the creation of budgetary slack. The experimental method is used in this study with 2x2 between subject design factorial. The participants were 152 postgraduate accounting and management students from two large private universities in Indonesia. First, controller business unit under high social pressure have a greater tendency to create budgetary slack. Second, procedural justice is more effective than distributive justice at reducing budgetary slack creation by controller business unit. Third, controller under conditions of low social pressure and distributive justice will still tend to create budgetary slack and on the contrary, procedural justice will decrease the tendency of budgetary slack creation even though there is a high social pressure. Fourth, after controlling Autonomous Motivation, there is still interaction effect between social pressure and organizational justice on the creation of budgetary slack by controller business unit.