Management control a development lever for Moroccan SMEs: an empirical study

Abstract

In terms of management and during the last ten years, the implementation of a management control system in large organizations has become an essential fact insofar as the latter facilitates decision-making techniques and removes the company's compartmentalization and allows managers to have a precise vision of the flow of information in order to make the right decisions at the right time. However, management control affects even SMEs; but on the other hand, small or medium-sized growing companies require distinct management approaches compared to large companies. They must adapt to a set of contingent variables such as strategy, technology, structure, culture as well as the environment in which they evolve, especially since SMEs are characterized by the vision, ambitions and motivations of the manager, and the latter relies on his intuition and judgment to make decisions and definitively refuses to delegate or to resort to an integrated management control system. This investigation is combined with deductive reasoning that leads to the confrontation of the theoretical framework and the formulated hypotheses. This article is based on a sample of 40 small and medium-sized companies with staff ranging from 10 to 150. The purpose of this article is to provide readers with recent and relevant information on the subject relating to the interest and the place occupied by the management control within the Moroccan SMEs and more particularly on the Casablanca Settat region. The information collected was analyzed using SPSS software. However, the objective of this article is to show to what extent the implementation of a management control department can have an impact on the increase of the performance of Moroccan SMEs. Our results reveal that SME managers are in need of implementing a management control system in order to improve performance which is associated with the good management of management control tools.