If you work in finance or insurance, the annual planning routine is probably so familiar that you could describe it without the presentation. Financial objectives are established, business units receive their targets, and managers translate them into sales expectations, recruitment requirements, budgets and individual performance commitments. Results are reviewed monthly, sometimes weekly. Deviations require explanations, corrective measures are agreed, and the process repeats throughout the year.
By June, the conversation may sound remarkably similar to the one held the previous year. Sales are below expectations, recruitment has taken longer than anticipated, costs have risen, and customers are behaving differently from the assumptions used in the forecast. Finance wants revised numbers, while senior management expects the responsible managers to explain how the business intends to recover the shortfall. Some of the difficulties have been reported for months. Others have become significant only recently, and genuine execution problems may be among them.
Then comes a familiar reminder: We agreed these targets together. It is a reasonable objection. Annual plans would be meaningless if managers could disregard their commitments whenever circumstances became difficult. But agreeing to a target involves several judgements that are rarely visible in the final number. Someone estimated the market opportunity, assessed the available resources, anticipated the costs and concluded that the proposed results could be achieved. The people responsible for delivery may have contributed to those calculations, negotiated the target or accepted a number largely determined elsewhere.
When performance falls short, the organisation has to determine what went wrong. The familiar reporting process is designed to establish why actual results differ from the approved plan. That comparison alone cannot tell management whether the problem lies in execution, changed economic circumstances or the assumptions on which the original target was approved.
Where Did January’s Numbers Come From?
An annual plan rarely begins with a single calculation. There may be a profit expectation from shareholders, a strategic growth ambition, a forecast prepared by Finance, a market opportunity identified by an operating division and a set of assumptions based on the previous year’s results. These elements eventually have to become one financial plan.
Consider the difference between three figures that may appear in the same planning presentation. A forecast estimates what is likely to happen under specified conditions. A target states what the organisation intends to achieve. A budget allocates resources and establishes the financial framework within which managers are expected to operate. The relationship between them can be perfectly sensible. A higher target may encourage management to pursue opportunities that would otherwise be missed. New investment may make the original forecast unnecessarily conservative. A productivity improvement may allow more business to be handled without a proportional increase in costs. But the target itself does not establish that these opportunities exist. The organisation still has to explain how the additional result will be produced.
In December 2024, Allianz announced financial ambitions for the 2024–2027 period, including annual growth of seven to nine per cent in core earnings per share and a core return on equity of at least 17 per cent. Alongside these shareholder-oriented measures, the insurer described the business assumptions expected to support them. Its property and casualty insurance division, for example, was expected to achieve annual revenue growth of six to seven per cent, together with specified profitability and efficiency improvements. The figures were accompanied by assumptions about individual business segments, productivity, capital generation and customer satisfaction. Allianz was describing a proposed route towards the financial result, rather than presenting a desired return without an accompanying business rationale.
By August 2026, the company was reporting strong first-half results and continued confidence in its strategic targets. That experience is worth considering because ambitious growth is not inherently unreasonable. A company with a competitive advantage, expanding demand or genuine efficiency opportunities may be able to sustain substantial increases in earnings. The important consideration is the evidence supporting a particular target.
Even in insurance, profit growth and sales growth are not interchangeable. A company can improve earnings through more accurate pricing, better control of claims costs, investment income, changes in the mix of business or greater operational efficiency. It may also increase revenue while profitability deteriorates. The distinction becomes less visible as the financial plan travels down the organisation. A group earnings objective can become a business-unit revenue target. That revenue target may become a requirement to sell more policies, recruit more advisers or conduct more customer meetings.
For such a plan to work, each conversion from one measure to the next requires an assumption. How many additional customers are available? What proportion will buy? How long will new recruits take to become productive? What will it cost to acquire and retain the additional business? Will the resulting transactions generate an acceptable return? These are questions that can be investigated. Once the numbers have been distributed across the management hierarchy, however, the underlying assumptions may become considerably less visible than the targets themselves.
We Agreed the Targets Together
The annual planning meeting is often described as a collaborative process. Managers present their expectations, negotiate resources, challenge particular figures and eventually accept the result. That agreement has organisational value. It establishes responsibilities and enables different parts of the company to coordinate their decisions. It also creates a difficulty when performance subsequently falls short.
Imagine a regional manager who has repeatedly improved her team’s sales results. She has introduced better working methods, recruited capable advisers and exceeded targets that initially appeared demanding. At the next planning meeting, last year’s figures are on the screen and another ten per cent is proposed. She knows the market has become more competitive, several experienced employees have left, and bringing new advisers up to the required standard will take time. While she is still working out where the additional business might come from, her manager says: “You’ve done exceptionally well. We need another ten per cent next year, but given your track record, I’m confident you could deliver even more. Let’s be conservative and settle on ten.”
She recognises the sandwich technique; she has used it herself with her own advisers. The encouragement may be entirely sincere, and the target may ultimately be achievable. Meanwhile, she is still calculating how many additional customers she would need, who could recruit the new advisers and how much time their training would take. Questioning the number now means challenging something that has just been described as the conservative option. Six months later, her agreement may be recalled more readily than the questions she was still trying to answer.
Research on goal-setting provides a more precise starting point. In a 2011 study published in The British Accounting Review, Mahfud Sholihin and colleagues examined 54 managers within a British financial services organisation. They found that participation in goal-setting was positively associated with commitment to the resulting goals, with perceived procedural fairness playing an important role. There is a good reason for organisations to involve managers in planning, then. Participation can support commitment. But the research did not establish that a jointly agreed target was a more accurate estimate of future economic performance.
Theresa Libby’s 1999 research into participative budgeting examined another relevant distinction. A manager may be given an opportunity to express an opinion without having the final authority to determine the budget. Libby investigated how that opportunity, and the explanation provided when a manager’s input does not influence the decision, affect perceptions of fairness and performance. An agreement reached after genuine negotiation is different from one reached after participants have been heard but the final number remains largely predetermined. Both may be described afterwards as a participative process.
Past success introduces a further complication. In three experiments published in The Accounting Review in 2023, Christoph Feichter investigated whether supervisors’ previous performance in lower-level jobs influenced the targets they subsequently established for employees. Supervisors who had themselves performed well set higher targets than supervisors with weaker previous performance, even when both groups received the same information about employees’ potential. The effect appeared when supervisors had experience of the particular task they were assigning. The findings suggest that managers can overestimate the general relevance of their own successful experience. This is especially interesting because the resulting expectations need not originate in deliberate pressure or bad faith. A successful manager may sincerely believe that others can reproduce her results.
The Wells Fargo investigation shows how the formal distribution of decision-making authority can create a much more serious problem. In April 2017, Wells Fargo’s independent directors published the findings of their investigation into the bank’s retail sales practices. The report documented an organisation strongly committed to year-on-year growth in the number of banking products sold. Some regional sales plans were internally known as 50/50 plans. According to the investigation, senior management expected only about half of the regions to meet them.
The regions did not necessarily determine their own targets. The degree of input from regional banking leaders varied over time, while final responsibility rested with the senior leadership of the Community Bank. The goals were subsequently passed down through the hierarchy. Regional managers, branches and individual employees were evaluated against them. Rankings, compensation and career opportunities were affected by performance relative to the targets.
Several regional leaders challenged the expectations. They raised concerns about unrealistic sales volumes and the increasing number of accounts that customers did not need or use. The independent investigation found that Community Bank leadership frequently interpreted resistance as an attempt to obtain easier targets or as evidence of poor local management. The result was an important difference between receiving an objection and treating it as information about the business.
The Wells Fargo case ultimately involved widespread improper sales practices, which the investigation linked to the bank’s sales culture, management and control failures. Its implications extend well beyond annual budgeting. Nevertheless, the report documents a point directly relevant to target-setting: participation in a management structure did not guarantee that those responsible for delivering the goals had sufficient influence over them, or that their warnings about feasibility received appropriate consideration. A company’s statement that everyone agreed the numbers may be entirely accurate. To understand what that agreement establishes, we also need to know how the numbers were determined, which objections were raised and what authority the participants had to change the result.
When Last Year’s Success Sets This Year’s Standard
Repeated target increases can emerge without anyone explicitly deciding that growth must continue indefinitely. A business performs well. The following year’s plan starts from that higher result. Management expects further improvement. The new target is distributed through the organisation, and another round of performance measurement begins. There may be good reasons for this progression. Improved technology can permanently reduce costs. Better training can raise productivity. A new market may provide additional customers for several years. But previous performance also reflects conditions outside management’s control. A favourable market, an unusually profitable contract or a temporary reduction in costs may make one year exceptionally successful. Unless those benefits can reasonably be expected to continue, building them into the next year’s starting point creates an additional demand on the business.
Management accounting research describes one form of this process as budget ratcheting. In 2002, Andrew Leone and Steve Rock published an analysis of business-unit budgets within a large multinational corporation. They found that favourable deviations from the previous budget were followed by larger increases in subsequent performance budgets than the reductions associated with similarly sized unfavourable deviations. The researchers also examined how these expectations could influence managers’ accounting decisions. Their findings concerned one corporation, and they recognised that adjusting future budgets to previous results may sometimes serve legitimate forecasting and incentive purposes. The practical difficulty arises when a favourable result is treated as evidence of permanent earning capacity without adequately examining its causes.
Wells Fargo provides an unusually clear illustration of how the problem can accumulate over time. Its independent directors’ report found that earlier sales totals included substantial numbers of low-quality accounts, some of which customers neither needed nor used. Those figures nevertheless contributed to the starting point for subsequent growth expectations. A target calculated from the previous year’s volume could therefore contain sales that had little genuine customer value. Maintaining growth from that enlarged baseline required even more accounts to be opened. Regional leaders argued that the increasing targets encouraged further low-quality sales, but senior Community Bank management did not adequately address their concerns.
This is more specific than saying that excessive ambition creates pressure. The quantity being used to justify the next target had become an imperfect measure of the economic activity management actually wanted. The same general issue can arise without misconduct. An insurer may increase premium income because it has raised prices to reflect inflation. A software company may report higher subscription revenue after renewing contracts at higher prices, despite losing customers. A manufacturer may increase sales revenue while selling fewer products. Those outcomes may improve or weaken profitability, depending on the economics of the business. None establishes by itself that the organisation has increased its underlying productive capacity.
For an annual plan built on continuing growth, the origin of the previous year’s improvement is therefore important. It determines how much of that result can reasonably be carried forward and what additional conditions must hold for the next increase to occur.
The Information Was Already Changing
The consequences of an outdated economic assumption can be seen in the performance of Direct Line Insurance Group during 2022. The British insurer entered that year after reporting strong results for 2021. Its weather-normalised combined operating ratio had been 91.1 per cent, ahead of its medium-term target range.
The terminology is technical, but the economics are straightforward. An insurer collects premiums and expects to pay claims and operating expenses. The combined operating ratio measures those costs against the corresponding insurance revenue. A ratio of 95 per cent means that approximately £95 of claims and relevant operating expenses are associated with every £100 of insurance revenue. At 103 per cent, the costs exceed that revenue by approximately £3. This measure describes the underwriting result. Investment income can still contribute to the insurer’s overall profitability. The weather-normalised version adjusts for differences between actual weather-related claims and a normal level, making it easier to examine the underlying performance of the business.
In March 2022, Direct Line reaffirmed its expectation of achieving a weather-normalised combined operating ratio of 93–95 per cent for the year. The company had reasons to expect continued progress. It had invested in pricing technology, developed its digital capabilities and reported a strong previous year. By the first quarter, however, costs in the motor insurance market were becoming more difficult to predict.
When an insurer sells a motor policy, it must estimate the likely cost of future claims. Some expenses, including vehicle repairs and compensation settlements, may arise well after the policy has been priced. If parts, labour and replacement vehicles become more expensive than expected, the insurer may have accepted premiums that are insufficient to cover the eventual costs. The number of accidents does not even have to increase. The average cost of each claim can rise.
On 4 May 2022, Direct Line acknowledged that motor insurance market prices did not fully reflect claims inflation. Its trading update referred to continued pressure from used-car prices, supply-chain disruption and repair costs. The same statement reported trading broadly in line with expectations and progress in several areas of the business. Management retained the 93–95 per cent target.
It would be tempting to describe this as evidence that the company was unwilling to confront the emerging problem. The public information available at that point does not establish such a conclusion. Management had identified the risk and was taking action, including developing new pricing capabilities. By July, however, the accumulated claims experience had changed the outlook.
In a trading update published on 18 July 2022, Direct Line reported that motor claims inflation during the first half of the year had exceeded the assumptions incorporated into its prices. It revised the expected full-year weather-normalised combined operating ratio to 96–98 per cent and described price increases and improvements in risk selection intended to restore margins.
The deterioration continued. When Direct Line published its 2022 results in March 2023, its weather-normalised combined operating ratio for ongoing operations was 103.3 per cent. In motor insurance, the reported combined operating ratio reached 114.7 per cent. The motor figure reflected particularly severe inflation in the cost of claims. Other business lines had performed considerably better.
On a comparable basis, operating profit from ongoing operations fell from £590.3 million in 2021 to £32.1 million in 2022. Higher-than-expected weather claims, market volatility and regulatory changes also contributed to the overall deterioration. The company’s own assessment was that it had not navigated the difficult conditions as effectively as it would have wished.
The sequence gives us several distinct decision points. In March, management reaffirmed the annual objective. By May, adverse cost developments were sufficiently clear to be discussed publicly, although the company still expected to meet its target. In July, actual experience had moved far enough away from the pricing assumptions to justify a revised outlook. The final result was considerably worse.
We cannot infer from the year-end numbers alone exactly what Direct Line’s management should have decided earlier. That requires examining the information reasonably available at each point, including how quickly pricing changes could affect new and renewed policies and how much uncertainty remained around future claims. But the case illustrates the central problem of an annual financial commitment. Its feasibility depends on economic relationships that continue to develop after the original plan has been approved. A company may report its performance against a fixed objective every month. The underlying economics are not fixed merely because the objective is.
Why More Effort May Not Close the Gap
Direct Line could respond to deteriorating margins through pricing decisions, changes in the risks it accepted, expense management and improvements in underwriting. It could not simply instruct vehicle repair costs to return to their earlier levels. Increasing premiums might improve the expected profitability of new business, but customers could respond by selecting another insurer. Lower premiums might protect policy volumes while leaving too little revenue to cover the cost of claims. The result depends on the balance between customer demand, pricing, claims costs and competition.
A simple illustration makes the problem visible. Suppose an insurer collects £500 for a policy and expects claims and relevant operating expenses of £450. On these simplified assumptions, the policy contributes £50 before investment income and any other items excluded from the calculation. If expected costs rise to £540 while the premium remains £500, the insurer is now expecting a £40 underwriting loss. Selling more policies with the same economics increases premium revenue, but also increases the expected loss. In that situation, demanding more sales activity may worsen the financial result the company is trying to improve.
The numbers are illustrative. They are not Direct Line figures. Their purpose is to show why sales volume and profitability must be examined separately. There are also circumstances in which greater activity is precisely the appropriate response. If potential customers exist, the product is competitively priced and advisers are failing to contact them, increasing prospecting activity may produce more business. Better recruitment, stronger training and improvements in customer service can also raise sustainable performance. The effectiveness of those measures depends on the relationship between the activity and the outcome.
An insurance sales organisation might measure the number of customer approaches, completed appointments, offers presented and contracts concluded. Management may then calculate what proportion of offers becomes a sale, how much it costs to acquire the business and how many customers retain their policies. When a target is missed, these measures can help determine what has changed. If advisers conduct fewer meetings than planned, the organisation has an activity shortfall. If the number of meetings is stable but fewer suitable customers purchase the product, the problem requires a different explanation.
Customers may have less disposable income, face more attractive alternatives or decide that a discretionary insurance product is no longer affordable. The original forecast may have assumed a conversion rate that the current market no longer supports. Insurance products also respond differently to economic conditions. Compulsory motor cover, household insurance and long-term life insurance serve different customer needs. Rising costs may prompt customers to shop around for cheaper motor insurance, reduce optional cover or reconsider longer-term savings commitments.
In its 2023 analysis of inflation, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority identified increasing claims and expense costs as pressures on non-life insurers. It also warned that weaker household saving capacity could affect life insurance sales and lead to more policy lapses. Those differences make blanket activity targets particularly difficult to evaluate without reference to the product and customer market.
The principle extends beyond insurance. Imagine a software company whose annual plan assumes that additional sales calls will generate more subscriptions. Its salespeople meet the expected activity levels, but prospective customers have begun reducing their technology budgets. Fewer enquiries become contracts, and retaining existing clients requires larger discounts and more customer support. The company could still achieve growth by improving its product or reaching a different market. Requiring the same sales team to make more calls, however, does not establish that those opportunities are available.
In both businesses, an initially plausible relationship between effort and output has to be tested against actual results. A performance report showing that the sales team is behind target identifies an outcome. It does not tell management which part of the business model needs to change.
The Work the Plan Did Not Fully Account For
Even where market demand is sufficient, an annual plan may underestimate the work required to generate the desired result. Consider an insurance sales organisation planning to increase its adviser headcount and new business production in the same year. The staffing plan projects how many new advisers will be recruited. The commercial plan estimates how much additional business they will generate. Training and management responsibilities are assigned to existing team leaders. On paper, the individual objectives may appear reasonable. The difficulty emerges when the same managers are responsible for delivering them simultaneously.
I encountered this tension in a qualitative study I conducted in 2020 into recruitment practices within the Hungarian operations of a European insurance group. The research involved interviews with eight insurance advisers, six team managers and two regional managers. It examined one organisation, with a small sample, and cannot establish the prevalence of similar difficulties across the insurance industry.
The organisation had formal recruitment and onboarding procedures, supported by a CRM system that recorded activities and monitored progress. Several managers nevertheless reported that prescribed mentoring, administrative and supervisory requirements could not always be completed as intended alongside their sales responsibilities. The company could track each required activity separately. The managers still had to find the hours to perform them all. An experienced team leader was expected to maintain the performance of an existing sales team while recruiting, training and supervising new advisers. Where turnover was high, the recruitment and training process had to be repeated for replacements.
The additional people were not immediately equivalent to an increase in productive capacity. New advisers required time and attention before they could work independently. A manager who devoted additional hours to this month’s sales results might therefore have fewer hours available for developing the people expected to produce future results. The competing work could be recorded as separate responsibilities, each with its own target and reporting process. It still required time from the same individual.
My study documented managers’ descriptions of those conflicts. It did not independently measure their total working hours or demonstrate that the conflicts caused a particular subsequent sales shortfall. Nevertheless, the findings provide an instructive example of what annual plans can leave unresolved. Recruiting ten additional advisers may be achievable. Increasing sales production may also be achievable. A structured onboarding process may be well designed. Whether all three can be completed by the same managers, within the same period and with the resources available, requires another calculation.
A delay in one activity can affect the others. If recruitment takes longer than anticipated, the expected new business may arrive later. If training is compressed to protect immediate sales activity, advisers may need additional support in subsequent months. If experienced staff leave, the organisation loses current production while increasing the need for replacements and mentoring. These effects are conditional. They do not occur in every team, and a company with adequate managerial capacity or efficient onboarding systems may avoid them. But where they do occur, the financial plan’s assumptions about when additional resources become productive can be as important as the eventual number recruited.
Short-term adjustments add another layer. A manager postpones training to deal with a customer problem. Another takes on additional responsibilities while a vacant position is filled. A project is delayed so that a more urgent commitment can be met. Such decisions may be sensible at the time. The postponed work, however, often remains part of the operating system. If it must be completed before another task can begin, the original timetable becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
This is a different mechanism from a decline in market demand. It produces the same visible symptom: results begin to diverge from plan. By the middle of the year, a business may therefore be carrying both financial assumptions that no longer reflect the market and operational commitments that no longer fit the capacity available. A report comparing actual results with the original annual target cannot, on its own, distinguish between these conditions.
Who Has to Explain the Original Plan?
There are legitimate reasons for a company to retain ambitious targets during periods of uncertainty. One disappointing month may have little significance. Some costs are temporary. A new employee may take longer than expected to become productive and then perform exceptionally well. A weak quarter can be followed by a strong one. Constantly reducing targets would undermine planning discipline and create incentives to explain away ordinary performance problems. The alternative is to establish what evidence would support each explanation.
Suppose a sales director has missed the first-half revenue target. Senior management asks for corrective action. The report shows that the team has completed the planned number of customer meetings, but fewer meetings have produced contracts. That evidence does not immediately resolve the issue. The quality of the meetings, the mix of customers and the suitability of the proposed products may have changed. Some advisers may be less effective than others. The team had delivered the planned number of meetings, so management first needed to understand why fewer of them resulted in contracts.
The company needs to examine conversion rates by product, customer segment and period. It needs to understand whether prices, customer affordability, competitive conditions or adviser performance have changed. If the conversion rate used in the original plan is no longer supported by the evidence, management must decide whether a different commercial approach can restore performance within the remaining months.
The same reasoning applies to capacity. Suppose an additional recruitment programme was approved because the business expected more productive advisers by June. If recruitment targets were met but the new advisers were not yet capable of generating the planned sales, the organisation should examine the productivity assumptions behind the staffing plan. How much business was expected from a new entrant, after how many months, and with what level of managerial support? Alternatively, if the recruitment activity itself was not carried out, responsibility may lie in execution. Both situations produce a lower-than-planned adviser contribution. They call for different decisions.
The uncomfortable part comes when the investigation reaches the original planning process. What if the forecast depended on a conversion rate that had already been weakening? What if the plan assumed that experienced managers could recruit and mentor additional employees without reducing the time available for their existing responsibilities? What if a previous year’s exceptionally favourable result was treated as the normal starting point for another increase? These assumptions may have been reasonable when approved. They may also have been inadequately examined.
The answer cannot be established by asking only whether the business-unit manager signed off the plan. That manager may have contributed to an optimistic forecast, failed to disclose known constraints or accepted a commitment without adequately assessing it. Such decisions carry responsibility. But someone also had to consolidate the different plans, assess whether their resource requirements were compatible, and judge the business case supporting the financial objectives.
There are circumstances in which the leaders who authorised the target possessed information that the people responsible for delivery did not. There are others in which local management had the better information but did not communicate it clearly. The Wells Fargo investigation illustrates an additional possibility: warnings can reach senior management and still be interpreted primarily as attempts to negotiate easier targets. Direct Line illustrates a different response. Its management publicly acknowledged changing economic conditions and revised its annual outlook when the reported evidence no longer supported the original expectation. The year-end results also show that recognising a problem and correcting it are separate challenges.
An accurate performance review has to reconstruct these decisions in their proper sequence. What did management know when the target was approved? What information became available afterwards? Who was in a position to recognise its significance? What changes were proposed, accepted or rejected? The responses determine whether the shortfall is principally evidence of weak execution, an unsuitable original plan, adverse changes in the business environment or some combination of the three. Without that examination, the approved target risks becoming the one element of the performance review whose own validity is taken for granted.
What June Can Tell Us About January
Return to the mid-year meeting. The financial director presents the difference between actual results and the approved plan. The sales director explains the decline in conversion. HR describes recruitment delays. Operations reports the additional work required to support existing commitments. Senior management wants to know whether the annual target can still be achieved.
There is enough information to begin answering that question, although it may not be enough to resolve it immediately. The company can examine whether the number of available customers matches the original forecast. It can determine whether sales activity has taken place, whether its conversion into profitable business has changed and whether the operating organisation has enough capacity to complete the work remaining. It can also revisit the original assumptions about pricing, costs, staffing and the expected contribution from different business units.
If those assumptions remain well supported, the pressure to improve execution may be entirely justified. If they have changed, management needs to understand whether the effects can realistically be offset through pricing, productivity, investment, reprioritisation or a different commercial approach. And if the original assumptions were never adequately justified, the investigation reaches further back than the current reporting period.
The fact that a target was approved does not make it immune to examination. Nor does an unfavourable result establish that the original decision was wrong. Forecasting always involves uncertainty, and some adverse developments become identifiable only after the business has committed its resources. The necessary judgement concerns what could reasonably have been known, when that information became available and what the organisation did with it.
For a company committed to recurring growth, this examination becomes increasingly important over successive planning periods. Another year of higher earnings may be entirely achievable, but the economic source of the increase must be identifiable. Improved productivity, a larger addressable market, a stronger product, more effective capital allocation and sustainable pricing each provide a different rationale for growth. Raising the target offers no substitute for establishing which of those opportunities can support it.
The June meeting can still end with a demand for better execution. In some businesses, that will be the correct decision. But if management cannot explain the original assumptions, the information that supported them and the reasons for continuing to rely on them, it has an incomplete basis for deciding whose performance requires correction.
A mid-year review may establish that managers failed to carry out activities they had agreed to perform. It may also reveal that those activities were completed, but the expected commercial results did not follow. In the second situation, another round of performance demands will achieve little unless management understands why the assumed relationship between effort and results has broken down. The original target, the evidence supporting it and the decisions taken as that evidence changed all belong in the same examination of performance.
References
Corporate documentation
Allianz SE (10 December 2024). Allianz lifts financial ambitions at its Capital Markets Day 2024.
Allianz SE (7 August 2026). Second-quarter and half-year 2026 results.
Direct Line Insurance Group (8 March 2022). Preliminary results for 2021.
Direct Line Insurance Group (4 May 2022). First-quarter trading update.
Direct Line Insurance Group (18 July 2022). Trading update.
Direct Line Insurance Group (13 March 2023). Preliminary results for 2022.
Independent Directors of the Board of Wells Fargo & Company (10 April 2017). Sales Practices Investigation Report.
European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (5 October 2023). Report on the Impact of Inflation on the Insurance Sector.
Academic research
Feichter, C. (2023). The Effect of Supervisors’ Prior Task Performance on Employees’ Targets. The Accounting Review, 98(1), 191–214.
Leone, A. J., & Rock, S. (2002). Empirical Tests of Budget Ratcheting and Its Effect on Managers’ Discretionary Accrual Choices. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 33(1), 43–67.
Libby, T. (1999). The Influence of Voice and Explanation on Performance in a Participative Budgeting Setting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 24(2), 125–137.
Sholihin, M., Pike, R., Mangena, M., & Li, J. (2011). Goal-Setting Participation and Goal Commitment: Examining the Mediating Roles of Procedural Fairness and Interpersonal Trust in a UK Financial Services Organisation. The British Accounting Review, 43(2), 135–146.
Author’s research
Gerlach, L. (2020). Egy magyarországi biztosító társaság toborzási tevékenysége 2000–2018 között [Recruitment Practices at an Insurance Company in Hungary, 2000–2018]. University of Sopron, dissertation. Qualitative study involving 16 interviews within one insurance organisation.