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This study examines how the strong emphasis placed on the purposes of budgeting, referring to a comprehensive focus on budgeting, is related to top managers' education and tenure while controlling for their functional positions in their respective firms and ages, as well as several company-specific predictors (information quality, firm size, information technology, importance of profit and strategy).

Survey data were collected from senior managers of large manufacturing firms in Finland and Sweden.

The results suggest that academic business education is positively associated with a comprehensive focus on budgeting, but tenure as well as functional position in the company (Chief Financial Officer (CFO) or not) and age are not. Overall, the company-specific control variables in general and information quality in particular are shown to have greater explanatory power than the top management characteristics analyzed.

This study identifies several empirically supported factors that seem to contribute to a comprehensive focus on budgeting. The effects of information quality, business education, the importance of profit and firm size could be considered in future research.

Academic business education matters more than the other top management characteristics analyzed. If organizations want to make comprehensive use of budgets, they should employ business graduates and be mindful of company-specific variables.

This study is the first to address a comprehensive focus on budgeting and some of its determinants. Future research could investigate a broader set of such determinants in different contexts.

The Q method is an inherently mixed-method approach suitable for tackling issues regarding theory, conceptualization and operationalization in the social sciences. Nevertheless, the application of this method in organizational behavior (OB) studies is still limited. This paper aims to delineate to what extent, regarding what topics, and in what ways the Q method has been applied in OB studies. Moreover, it aims to systematically explore the strengths and weaknesses of this method for the OB field.

We present a systematic literature review of 47 studies employing the Q method in OB research.

There is an upward trend in the application of Q in OB research. The studies in our sample address the following OB topics: Human resource management (HRM) (14), leadership (10), group decision-making (6), collaboration (4), culture (9) and organizational change and development (4). We describe how Q is used in a wide variety of ways.

This study shows how performance-oriented organizations can benefit from the Q method as a managerial diagnostic and intervention tool in organizational change and development and in human resources management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic literature review on the Q method that spans the field of organizational behavior across topics and research levels, including the individual, team and organizational levels.