Stephen K. Asare , Herman van Brenk , Kristina C. Demek
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Evidence on the homogeneity of personality traits within the auditing profession
Audit firms’ diversity initiatives have focused on enhancing surface-level diversity (e.g., gender and race). While these initiatives serve an important social and business function, we argue that they may not enhance deep-level diversity (e.g., personality traits and thinking styles), creating a gap between rhetoric and reality in terms of deep-level characteristics. We combine critical and positivistic research perspectives to make sense of this rhetoric-reality gap and specifically examine personality trait diversity in audit firms. Focusing on deep-level traits is important because people may appear diverse while thinking and acting similarly. We use data from 981 auditors to examine personality trait diversity using the Five Factor Model: neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Our results show a remarkable homogeneity of personality traits for auditors within the same firm type or experience level. We also find important differences within each personality trait. For example, all firm types and experience levels tend to be more homogenous on extroversion and conscientiousness, but more diverse on openness. Taken together, the results suggest that audit firms remain largely homogenous at the personality level, notwithstanding their recent diversity rhetoric and initiatives. These results provide timely evidence to support audit firms’ efforts to re-evaluate and re-consider their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
期刊介绍:
Critical Perspectives on Accounting aims to provide a forum for the growing number of accounting researchers and practitioners who realize that conventional theory and practice is ill-suited to the challenges of the modern environment, and that accounting practices and corporate behavior are inextricably connected with many allocative, distributive, social, and ecological problems of our era. From such concerns, a new literature is emerging that seeks to reformulate corporate, social, and political activity, and the theoretical and practical means by which we apprehend and affect that activity. Research Areas Include: • Studies involving the political economy of accounting, critical accounting, radical accounting, and accounting''s implication in the exercise of power • Financial accounting''s role in the processes of international capital formation, including its impact on stock market stability and international banking activities • Management accounting''s role in organizing the labor process • The relationship between accounting and the state in various social formations • Studies of accounting''s historical role, as a means of "remembering" the subject''s social and conflictual character • The role of accounting in establishing "real" democracy at work and other domains of life • Accounting''s adjudicative function in international exchanges, such as that of the Third World debt • Antagonisms between the social and private character of accounting, such as conflicts of interest in the audit process • The identification of new constituencies for radical and critical accounting information • Accounting''s involvement in gender and class conflicts in the workplace • The interplay between accounting, social conflict, industrialization, bureaucracy, and technocracy • Reappraisals of the role of accounting as a science and technology • Critical reviews of "useful" scientific knowledge about organizations