accountability

Examples of accountability in the following topics:

• The Importance of Accountability

  • Being accountable simply means being responsible for decisions made, actions taken, and assignments completed.
  • The United States Department of Organization provides specific guidelines for managerial accountability.
  • In organizations, accountability is a management control process in which responses are given for a person's actions.
  • Because there is no global, democratically elected body to which organizations must account, global organizations from all sectors' bodies are often criticized as having large accountability gaps.
  • The United States Department of Organization provides specific guidelines about accountability of managers.

• Social Responsibility Audits

  • As with financial audits, social responsibility audits involve accounting processes.
  • This type of accounting originated in the early 1990s and is known by various names, including social accounting, sustainability accounting, CSR reporting, environmental and social governance (ESG) reporting, and triple-bottom-line accounting (encompassing social and environmental as well as financial reporting).
  • In most countries, existing legislation regulates only a fraction of accounting for socially relevant corporate activity.
  • Having third-party groups conduct social audits is one way that corporations are held accountable for their CSR performance.
  • Environmental-related accounting might address pollution emissions, resources used, or wildlife habitats damaged or re-established.

• Accountability in Teams

  • In a management context, accountability explicitly identifies who is responsible for ensuring that outcomes meet goals and creates incentives for success.
  • Organizations often use team-based rewards to hold teams accountable for their work.
  • A sense of accountability to the team creates an incentive for individuals to provide help when needed.
  • Teams use norms and other forms of social pressure to hold one another accountable.
  • For accountability to work, teams need to have the resources, skills, and authority to do what they are being held responsible for.

• Managers Role in Ethical Conduct

  • Managers hold positions of authority that make them accountable for the ethical conduct of those who report to them.
  • A fiduciary must put the interests of those to whom he is accountable ahead of any interests, and must not profit from his position as a fiduciary unless the principal consents.
  • The stakeholders will be interested to hear how the organization took ethics into account, and in those cases it is the manager's duty to speak on the company's behalf.

• Self-Managing Teams

  • A self-managing team is a group of employees working together who are accountable for all or most aspects of their task.
  • A self-managing team is a group of employees working together who are accountable for most or all aspects of their task.

• Defining Ethics

  • Professionals such as managers, lawyers, and accountants are individuals who exercise specialized knowledge and skills when providing services to customers or to the public.
  • For example, lawyers must hold client conversations confidential and accountants must display the highest levels of honest and integrity in their record keeping and financial analysis.

• Middle-Level Management

  • Middle management is the intermediate management level accountable to top management and responsible for leading lower level managers.
  • They are accountable to the top-level management for their department's function, and they devote more time to organizational and directional functions than upper management.

• Non-Rational Decision Making

  • To account for these limitations, alternative models of decision making offer different views of how people make choices.
  • This process takes into account new information and considers multiple scenarios of how the future will evolve.

• Project Management Audits

  • This usually refers to audits in accounting, but similar concepts also exist in project management and quality management, as the auditing of steps and processes in a project systematically or randomly to insure that the project is meeting estimated completion and quality standards.
  • Identify how project managers can use the common accounting concept of audits to achieve optimal levels of control and efficiency

• Advantages and Disadvantages of Group Decision Making

  • Group decisions take into account a broader scope of information since each group member may contribute unique information and expertise.
  • One possible disadvantage of group decision making is that it can create a diffusion of responsibility that results in a lack of accountability for outcomes.