This paper is motivated by the desire to educate practitioners, who are sponsors and consumers of management accounting research, on the fundamental of research. We review the scientific method with a hypothetical example to investigate the drivers of budget gaming using Vroom’s expectancy theory as the theoretical basis. This review contributes to the debate of the state of management accounting research arising from the Zimmerman paper in the Journal of Accounting and Economics in 2001, and several responses published in the European Accounting Review in 2002. This review is also useful for practitioners and novice researchers, to understand the principles of research and judge the validity of research output.