Kristin Rosalina, Ruzita Jusoh
This study aims to investigate the enabling role of beliefs and interactive control systems in enhancing academics’ intrinsic motivation, mitigating task difficulty’s side effects on counterproductive work behaviour (CWB) and improving academics’ work performance. These work outcomes become current challenges for accounting schools in developing countries like Indonesia, including the research and student quality deterioration trends that are left behind compared to other business school disciplines. Meanwhile, how the institutions develop their control systems affects those performances because the proper systems escalate intrinsic motivation and mitigate CWB. This study analyses 251 online survey responses from Indonesian accounting academics using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The findings depict the positive association between enabling control systems and intrinsic motivation. The interaction between task difficulty and intrinsic motivation decreases the adverse effect of task difficulty on CWB. The lower CWB is associated with higher performance. This study’s novel contributions highlight the critical role of intrinsic motivation in connecting the enabling control systems with academics’ work-related outcomes. This motivation significantly mitigated academics’ CWB during the emergence of task difficulty. Hence, overlooking academics’ intrinsic motivation consequences in the organisation’s control design will lead to the systems’ dysfunction. © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Department of Accounting, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Brawijaya, Malang, Indonesia; Department of Accounting, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
