Management accountants are among the key business professionals within organizations and represent an attractive career path for many graduates of business and economics programmess. In public perception, however, management accountants are often primarily associated with cost control and cost reduction—tasks that are particularly important in economically challenging times. Yet this view is too narrow.

In many organizations, the work of management accountants extends far beyond these traditional responsibilities. They analyze data and support management by providing decision-relevant information for a wide range of strategic and operational issues. In doing so, they act as business advisers to management. In the management accounting literature, this expanded role is referred to as the business partner role.

By performing the business partner role, management accountants can make particularly important contributions to organizational success. While many studies have examined how top management can foster management accountants’ business partner role, a recent research article focuses on a perspective that has received far less attention: that of the management accountants themselves.

Professor Paula Dirks, together with Associate Professor Sandra Tillema and Professor Rouven Trapp (Ulm University, Germany) examined how management accountants themselves contribute to shaping the change toward the business partner role. The study focuses in particular on the proactive shaping of one’s own work (job crafting) and the influence of individual personality traits.

Published in the leading academic journal Accounting, Organizations and Society, the study is based on a survey of management accountants working in a European financial organization. The findings show that individuals with a high degree of openness to experience are especially likely to actively craft their job. They adjust their tasks on their own initiative and deliberately seek interaction with managers. In this way, they independently contribute to the further development of management accountants’ business partner role within their organizations.

As the authors explain: “The findings also have important practical implications. Organizations can support this development by paying attention to personality traits such as openness to experience when selecting and developing employees, while at the same time creating work environments that encourage initiative and provide room for proactive role shaping.”

Dirks, P., Tillema, S., and Trapp, R.: Management accountants’ personalities and their involvement in business partnering: A job crafting perspective. In: Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 116, 101638, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2026.101638