The Human Side of Organizational Change: Compliance and Management Control Systems Within Italian Public Utilities

Departing from a neo-institutional framework, this paper investigates the role and the importance of Management Control Systems used by the Italian local public transport and electricity supply utilities in governing the processes of organizational change occurred in the last decade. The role of MCS in the implementation of business strategy and organizational change represents a recurrent topic in literature. Nevertheless, only few studies have covered until now the relationship between Management Control Systems and change processes. Our empirical analysis has surveyed overall 185 local public utilities. We analysed the way in which management has adopted MCS, as well as the outcome of the implementation of organizational change. Our study confirms that organizational change processes are carried out with the purpose of obtaining institutional legitimacy, deploying behavioural control mechanisms, such as incentives and empowerment.