Investigating the Correlation between Public Hospitals Managers' Accountability Pressure in Kerman City and Budgetary Slack with Focusing on the Role of Moral Intelligence and Information Asymmetry in 2022: A Descriptive Study

Budgetary slack has been defined as managers’ request for a budget beyond the actual requirements, which can be influenced by the accountability pressure, information asymmetry, and moral intelligence. The aim of this study was to investigate the correlation between healthcare managers' accountability pressure and budgetary slack with focusing on the role of moral intelligence and information asymmetry in public hospitals in Kerman.

In the current descriptive study, the statistical population consisted of all the managers who participated in the budgeting process in any way in the public hospitals of Kerman City in 2022. One-hundred questionnaires were collected by distributing questionnaires among the statistical population. In order to test the research model, structural equations modeling was used.

The research findings indicated that there was a negative and significant relationship between the accountability pressure and budgetary slack (β=-0.169, p<0.001). Moreover, there was a positive and significant relationship between information asymmetry and budgetary slack (β=0.809, p<0.001). In addition, it should be noted that the information asymmetry and moral intelligence variables did not have a moderating role in the relationship between accountability pressure and budgetary slack.

Considering the participative role of managers and the sufficient opportunity to create budgetary slack, upper managers should prevent the creation of budgetary slack by monitoring as closely as possible, reviewing and applying more controls, and increasing the accountability pressure, while improving the performance of lower-level managers.