Accountants' personality types and their commitment to organization and profession*

Abstract

Abstract. This study, based on Holland's theory, examines the relationship between accountants' personality types and their commitment to work in various occupational settings and organizational levels. Empirical evidence on this subject may have useful implications for personnel selection and job design in public accounting firms as well as in industry. The results show that conventional and enterpnsing types were the most frequent among the 1206 Canadian CAs and 810 California CPAs who participated in the study. In addition, a larger proportion of sole practitioners and partners in small firms tend to be of the conventional type, whereas the enterprising type compnses the largest proportion of partners in large firms. Canonical correlations indicate that accountants' commitment to both profession and organization is essentially related to their scores as conventional and enterprising types.

Organisational and professional commitment of early career accountants: do mentoring and organisational ethical climate matter?

“…Prior studies reveal significant associations between accountants' PC and job‐related outcomes, for example turnover intentions (Lee et al ., ; Hall and Smith, ), attitudes towards rule observance (Jeffrey and Weatherholt, ), sign‐off judgments (Lord and DeZoort, ) and involvement in professional accounting associations (Meyer et al ., ; Hall et al ., ). In terms of the antecedents to PC, similar to findings for OC, a variety of factors have been identified at the personal, organisational and situational levels such as personality type (Aranya et al ., ; Aranya and Wheeler, ), ethical orientation (Shaub et al ., ), public accounting firms versus industry/government organisations (Aranya et al ., ; Aranya and Ferris, ; Bline et al ., ), professional–organisational conflict, satisfaction with rewards (Aranya et al ., ) and professional membership (Aranya and Ferris, ; Harrell et al ., ).…”

Personality Biases of Accounting Students: Some Implications for Learning Style Preferences

“…Intuitive people prefer to include insights from the unconscious mind and look at sense data more vaguely, concentrating on abstractions, inferred meanings and the hidden 1. An alternative personality typology based on the work of Holland (1962) has also been applied to accountants by Aranya and his colleagues (Aranya, Bar& and Amemic, 1981;Aranya, Meir and Bar-Ilm, 1978;Aranya and Wheeler, 1986). While the MBTI is an attempt to operationalise Jungian theory, there is some doubt of its success in achieving this because of the measurement focus on preferred social behaviour rather than direct psychological preference (Coan, 1978).…”

Auditors' legal liability, collusion with management, and investors' loss*

“…Assume for simplicity, Y + I -Kil) > ho, that is, the auditor's assets plus insurance coverage minus the insurance premium are sufficient to meet the maximum loss. Then, the auditor's decision problem is 11 Aranya and Wheeler (1986) examined the differences in behavior of sole practitioners and partners in large firms. Following their method, it may be possible to confirm empirically whether the extent of audit is less for sole practitioners than for partners in large accounting firms, as implied by our model.…”