تجزیه و تحلیل رابطه بین انعطاف پذیری و کاهش کیفیت حسابرسی در پارادایم نقش استرس An analysis of the relation between resilience and reduced audit quality within the role stress paradigm

1. Introduction Independent auditors have a responsibility to examine a firm’s financial statements and offer an opinion regarding whether those statements fairly represent, in all material respects, that company’s financial position as of a particular date. Thus, auditors serve as “critical gatekeepers in the financial reporting process,” and play an essential role in the effective functioning of the capital markets around the world (SEC, 2013). Consequently, anything that has the potential to degrade the quality of financial audits is of concern to management, investors, regulators, the audit firm itself, and any other stakeholder who may rely on these opinions (Herrbach, 2001). Auditor involvement in reduced audit quality practices (RAQP) has that potential. It is our contention that, ceteris paribus, the higher one’s level of resilience, i.e., the ability to persevere under stressful conditions, the less likely that person will engage in these dysfunctional audit behaviors. Thus, the objective of this study is to test the proposition that one’s resilience level is associated with a change in the propensity to engage in RAQP. Our primary motivation is to determine if highly resilient individuals report lower levels of dysfunctional audit behaviors – taking into account the simultaneous influence of role stressors and other identifiable factors. Highly resilient individuals are those who have the skill and capacity to bounce back and remain productive in the face of adversity. We premise this assertion on the notion that resilience is a learned characteristic, one that can be enhanced through workplace interventions. This tactic has heretofore escaped significant attention in the accounting stress literature and by those charged with bettering the public accounting work environment. Methodologically, we test an expanded role stress model that included established measures of resilience and role stressors as exogenous antecedents, stress arousal and burnout as mediators, and RAQP as the dependent variable. We gather the data for each of the measures using recall survey instruments as described in the Methods section below. Using structural equations modeling procedures we find resilience to have significant direct negative relations with stress arousal, burnout, and RAQP, as well as a significant indirect negative relation with RAQP though its associations with arousal and burnout. The balance of this paper is organized as follows. The following section provides an in-depth review of the constructs examined in this study. Section 3 presents the theoretical model and provides the rationale for each hypothesis tested. Next, we discuss the methods employed to test the hypothesized associations among the constructs, followed by a detailed examination of the results. We then consider the implications of our findings with respect to the primary motivation of the study. The concluding sections delineate the limitations of the study followed by conclusions focused on the auditing work environment.