Beyond budgeting in Statoil : ownership towards ambition to action

Abstract

Beyond Budgeting is the concept of moving away from the traditional budget, and ownership is crucial when going beyond the budget. According to Pierce, Kostova and Dirks (2001, 2003), psychological ownership is when an individual feels psychologically tied to something. This thesis aims to enrich the ownership literature, and factors influencing psychological ownership towards Statoil’s performance management process, Ambition to Action, have been hypothesized. Ambition to Action involves strategic objectives, KPIs, actions and individual goals. Statistical findings indicate that the feeling of ownership towards KPIs tends to be weaker than the feeling of ownership towards actions, strategic objectives and individual goals. Furthermore, time is an issue when working on Ambition to Action. The hypotheses that were statistically supported in this thesis are related to the number of sub-­‐units, trust and information sharing. Hypotheses related to dependency and number of employees do not get support, and are therefore rejected.