When Good Deeds Become Assets: An AI-Enabled Management Control and Accounting Governance Framework for the Erosion of Workplace Spirituality
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: As AI-enabled workplace monitoring expands, organizations may increasingly have the technical capacity to classify prosocial conduct, assign scores, and link those scores to managerial incentives. This paper treats the governance implications as an AI-enabled management control and accounting governance question, not an engineering scoring study; reward crowding-out is borrowed evidence, not a new finding here. It makes two contributions. First, it explains how accounting measurement, target setting, budgeting, disclosure, and compensation design turn a fleeting motivational reaction into a durable arrangement reproduced across reporting periods. Second, it analyzes the asymmetry between auditable behavioral indicators and moral costs that resist measurement, and why those costs stay out of ordinary records. A four-arm governance design—management control, financial reporting, internal audit, compensation—extends these contributions in practice. Three layers and four falsifiable propositions follow, offered for later testing, not validated causal claims.
Source: Preprints.org
Author: Bing Chen
Language: English
Subfield: Management Information Systems
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224469935