Christoph Feichter

Work at IfU, previous experience and academic profile

Christoph Feichter is Full 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 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 subjectivity when setting performance targets and evaluating their employees. While his main research method is experiments, he also works with survey and archival data in his research projects. The results of his research have been published in leading international journals, such as The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Management Science, Accounting, Organizations and Society, and Journal of Management Accounting Research, as well as Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research.

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

Research interest

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