The moderating effect of demographics and institutional characteristics between religiosity and cost management accounting practices of rural SMEs

Abstract

The main purpose of the study was to evaluate the direct and indirect effects that owner/manager demographic attributes and firm characteristics have on the relationship between religiosity and the two dependent variables, cost accounting and management accounting in Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) of subsistence economies. Self-administered survey was used to draw responses from 100 SMEs in Manicaland Province, Zimbabwe. To facilitate the analysis of the data, given the moderation effect that sought to be tested, both IBM SPSS Statistics v26 and the Hayes Process Macro for SPSS were used. The moderation effect was validated through general linear factorial MANOVA. The study provided evidence on the significance of education in moderating the relationship between religiosity and cost and management practices (CMAPS). However, two demographic variables (age and gender) and three firm characteristics (revenue, number of employees and years in business) were not statistically significant and therefore had no interaction effects between these independent and dependent variables. It was recommended to encourage on lifelong learning and education to entrepreneurs as a way of enhancing the use of cost and management accounting practices in subsistence markets so as to boost their financial performance.