The Mediating Effect of Self-leadership Between Metacognition And Management Accountants' Decision making

In order to survive in an ever-changing world, companies need empowered employees. Therefore, management accountants' empowerment is an important issue, especially in underdeveloped countries. Management accounting tools that are used in Iran are not suitable for companies' strategies with regard to management accounting knowledge development.  On the other hand,  keeping up with management accounting's change and growth of knowledge is becoming a challenge for management accountants in a competent world.  The purpose of this study is to determine the contribution of metacognition on management accountants' decision making by effecting their self-leadership skills. Data was gathered from 83 out of 107 graduate students who had studied management accounting in their courses in Islamic Azad university of Tehran Science and Research Branch. These students had enrolled in graduate classes on the fall semester of 2016. Factor analysis and path analysis have been used for this study. The findings show that self-leadership has a negative impact on management accountants' decision. Meaning high self-leadership skills in management accountants has a negative effect on their innovative and foresight behavior. Since management accountants' metacognition has a positive impact on their self-leadership skills, therefore, management accountants' metacognitive abilities do not indirectly lead to innovative behaviors by effecting management accountants' self-leadership skills. Instead, judging by the tools and techniques they have chosen, management accountants with better self-leadership skills prefer more hindsight decisions. This study has been conducted in Iran which is a low privatized country with centralized management, replicating it in developed countries would give better views on this matter.