查看文章

Researchers in accounting have mainly focused on the use of financial information by investors, financial markets, creditors, and management. Although employees are classified as a group of users of financial information, it is not clear how and in what extent employees are using accounting information. On the theory base, there is less discussion about the theories which explain why and how accounting information is useful to this group of users. This paper illustrates how the expectancy theory can explain the usefulness of accounting information to employees. According to this theory, employees are rational and information seekers who use relevant information to make proper reaction and they use available information to determine the plausibility of the compensation plans offered by the firm. Accounting information is among the available information to employees which is the official information about the firm's financial performance. Therefore, accounting information could explain employees' behavior only if this information is correlated with their reactions to the compensation plans. If this information could explain the employees behavior, then we should be able to develop a prediction model and to identify informative factors. This paper investigates this issue by analyzing the usefulness of accounting information to explain the behavior of the employees in adoption or rejection of a profit sharing plan.