The Price of Compliance: Managerial Cognitive Load in Process-Oriented EU R&D Funding
Keywords:
Managerial cognitive load, EU R&D funding, process-oriented monitoring, organizational duality, principal-agent theory, normalized deviance, compliance costAbstract
This study examines how process-oriented EU R&D funding can impose persistent burdens on corporate management. Its starting point is a specific organizational phenomenon: the condition in which a company’s actual technological trajectory and its documented project path — constructed to satisfy funder expectations — gradually diverge. Drawing on principal-agent theory, cognitive dissonance, and organizational accounts of normalized deviance, the paper argues that compliance-intensive funding environments generate not only administrative but psychological consequences for managers (Jensen & Meckling, 1976; Arrow, 1985; Festinger, 1957; Vaughan, 1996). Information asymmetry, documentation pressure, and internal accountability ambiguity together can produce decision fragmentation and role strain. The manuscript is theoretical in character — grounded not in direct psychological measurement but in the reinterpretation of prior organizational and comparative analyses (Stern, 2014; Stern, 2015). Its central claim is this: the price of compliance is not merely a question of innovation policy or administration. It restructures the conditions under which managerial cognition operates.
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