Christoph Feichter

Work at IfU, previous experience and academic profile

Christoph Feichter is Associate Professor in Managerial Accounting at the Department for Strategy and Innovation. He holds a PhD from Maastricht University (The Netherlands), where he also worked as Assistant Professor before. He has done several long-term research visits at top research universities, including the University of Texas at Austin (USA), the University of Waterloo (Canada), and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (USA).

Christoph conducts behavioral management control research. He examines how organizations design their performance management systems, how supervisors use these systems and how they affect the employee behavior. For example, his research shows how multi-divisional organizations structure their target-setting systems; how performance targets on routine tasks can boost employees’ creativity; and how supervisors use their subjectivity when setting performance targets and when evaluating their employees. While his main research method are experiments, he also works with survey and archival data in his research projects. The results of his research have been published in the leading international accounting journals, such as The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, and Journal of Management Accounting Research, as well as the Schmalenbachs Zeitschrift für betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung (highest ranked German speaking business research journal).

Christoph has taught a large variety of courses at Bachelor-, Master-, and Postgraduate-level. While the main focus of his teaching has been on management accounting and control, he also taught courses in many other fields such as finance, strategic management, and philosophy of science. The course settings have been very diverse and range from small group problem-based learning, over company project courses, to lecture style classes.

Research interest

Management Accounting, Performance Management, Budgeting and Target Setting, Performance Evaluation, and Creativity and Management Control; Experimental-, survey-, and archival methods