When Good Deeds Become Assets: An AI-Enabled Management Control and Accounting Governance Framework for the Erosion of Workplace Spirituality

As AI-enabled workplace monitoring expands, organizations may increasingly have the technical capacity to classify prosocial conduct, assign scores, and link those scores to managerial incentives. This paper treats the governance implications as an AI-enabled management control and accounting governance question, not an engineering scoring study; reward crowding-out is borrowed evidence, not a new finding here. It makes two contributions. First, it explains how accounting measurement, target setting, budgeting, disclosure, and compensation design turn a fleeting motivational reaction into a durable arrangement reproduced across reporting periods. Second, it analyzes the asymmetry between auditable behavioral indicators and moral costs that resist measurement, and why those costs stay out of ordinary records. A four-arm governance design—management control, financial reporting, internal audit, compensation—extends these contributions in practice. Three layers and four falsifiable propositions follow, offered for later testing, not validated causal claims.

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Publication Details

Journal
Preprints.org
Published
2026-10-28
DOI
https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202610.2889.v1
Primary Topic
Accounting and Organizational Management
Type
preprint
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preprint

When Good Deeds Become Assets: An AI-Enabled Management Control and Accounting Governance Framework for the Erosion of Workplace Spirituality

Bing Chen
Preprints.org
Accounting and Organizational Management
preprint

When Good Deeds Become Assets: An AI-Enabled Management Control and Accounting Governance Framework for the Erosion of Workplace Spirituality

Bing Chen
preprint en

Abstract

As AI-enabled workplace monitoring expands, organizations may increasingly have the technical capacity to classify prosocial conduct, assign scores, and link those scores to managerial incentives. This paper treats the governance implications as an AI-enabled management control and accounting governance question, not an engineering scoring study; reward crowding-out is borrowed evidence, not a new finding here. It makes two contributions. First, it explains how accounting measurement, target setting, budgeting, disclosure, and compensation design turn a fleeting motivational reaction into a durable arrangement reproduced across reporting periods. Second, it analyzes the asymmetry between auditable behavioral indicators and moral costs that resist measurement, and why those costs stay out of ordinary records. A four-arm governance design—management control, financial reporting, internal audit, compensation—extends these contributions in practice. Three layers and four falsifiable propositions follow, offered for later testing, not validated causal claims.

Preprints.org
Accounting and Organizational Management
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