| Federal government organizations were mandated to adopt commercial sector measures to streamline processes and increasing financial accountability. This can be accomplished through the implementation of process improvement approaches, such as total quality management (TQM) and activity-based costing (ABC). When ABC is implemented as a TQM initiative, it reduces costs associated with poor quality products and services, promotes process streamlining, and identifies excess capacity and resource consumption. The purpose of this study was to identify the socio-technical variables of activity-based costing, and to determine if these socio-technical variables influence the ABC implementation in a specific federal government organization located in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. This study replicated the private sector research and survey of Michael Shields (1995) in an attempt to evaluate how well existing behavioral, technical, and organizational factors were addressed during the ABC implementation process. Studies, such as those of Michael Shields (1995), tend to rely on the theoretical assumptions of the equilibrium theory and the socio-technical approach which endorse a balance between the social and technical systems. The results of this study showed that there is a link between organizational, behavioral, and technical influencing variables and ABC implementation success and financial benefit dependent variables within the targeted federal government organization. In addition, the results of this public sector study generally support the findings of the private sector Shields study, which indicated a greater correlation between organizational and behavior variables and perceived overall success and financial benefit of ABC, and a weak correlation between technical variables and perceived overall success and financial benefit of ABC. |
