Technological innovation is increasing throughout the audit industry. Although prior research has explored how specific technological innovations have influenced the audit product and the profitability of the audit, the strategic implications of technological innovation for the audit industry have yet to be examined. To address this issue, we adopt Christensen's seminal theory of technological innovation (introduced in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma) to gain insight into the results of 27 semistructured interviews with auditors and audit technical specialists. Consistent with Christensen's sustaining and efficiency strategic responses, our findings suggest that, at this time, technology is primarily being used by the audit industry to strengthen the audit industry's ability to serve mainstream clients by providing a “higher-quality” and lower-cost audit to replace menial tasks that historically have been done by junior auditors. We find that industry-disruptive new market entry is currently prevented by regulatory and professional barriers; however, strategic disruption to the audit industry appears inevitable as technology is already being used in audits of nonregulated markets by new entrants. Strategically, the audit industry will survive in its current recognizable form only if self-disruption occurs before the regulatory barriers are dropped, which requires significant upskilling in the industry to ensure that firms have the skills to be first movers whenever technological innovations are introduced.
The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated an extensive involuntary shift to remote work and has since dramatically reshaped work and its supervision. We examine how employees' perceived productivity is associated with remote work during the pandemic, how supervisory controls moderate this relationship, and how remote work and perceived productivity impact employee preference for post-pandemic remote work. We survey 589 workers in June 2020 via Mechanical Turk and find a directionally positive but nonsignificant association between remote work and perceived productivity. Additional analysis, however, indicates an indirect positive effect of remote work on perceived productivity through more hours worked. We further find supervisory monitoring intensity (SMI) is positively associated with perceived productivity, and the association between remote work and perceived productivity is more negative with more intense supervisory monitoring. Outcome-based evaluation is also positively associated with perceived productivity, but it does not moderate the relationship between remote work and perceived productivity. Supervisor-based evaluation has no significant association with perceived productivity, nor does it moderate the relationship between remote work and perceived productivity. Overall, our results suggest the main effect of remote work on perceived productivity during the pandemic is weak at best, and SMI is less compatible with remote work supervision than outcome-based evaluation. Finally, we find increased remote work and perceived productivity improvement during the pandemic are positively associated with preference for post-pandemic remote work, and we find a marginal positive interaction effect between them. These findings provide empirical evidence of the pandemic's repercussions on the post-pandemic work environment.
In incentive contracts, supervisors often set targets for employee performance, while employees decide the effort they are willing to exert to meet the target and earn the incentive. Both supervisors and employees make judgments about the value of incentives in terms of effort required or expended. Recent research on incentive types investigates employee effort in response to tangible and cash rewards under the premise that they may be valued differently by employees. We extend this research by investigating whether supervisors and employees make different effort-related decisions in response to tangible and cash rewards. Specifically, relying on construal-level theory, we predict that supervisors will favor tangible rewards relative to cash more than employees will. We conduct a lab experiment where we ask participants to take the role of either supervisor or employee. We manipulate the reward type (tangible or cash) and measure how much work supervisors demand and employees are willing to provide to obtain the reward. As predicted, we find that the tangible rewards, relative to cash, increase supervisors' target setting significantly more than employee effort levels. Our results offer implications for real-world incentive compensation design.
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