Employing big data & analytics in decision-making: Factors affecting managers' trustworthiness

The growing attention that Big Data & Analytics (BD&A) are actually raising among academics and practitioners is probably triggered by their almost infinite information potential. On the other side, BD&A hold specific peculiarities (source, structure of data or computational complexity), which may condition the inclination of users to consider them reliable. This paper investigates the factors that may hinder or enable managers' trustworthiness about BD&A when used in support of planning and control, both at strategic and operational level where a different organizational learning is assumed to be required. Using data from a survey, we find that the organizational learning mode significantly conditions the perceived usefulness of BD&A. Additionally, managers' individual characteristics, under some conditions, may hinder their inclination to rely on BD&A. The findings contribute to literature on management accounting systems and on organizational learning and provide as well interesting managerial implications.