Professional and Job‐related Attitudes and the Behaviours they Influence among Governmental Accountants

Abstract

This study investigates professional and job‐related attitudes and behavioural intentions of 427 state and municipal governmental accountants from five southwestern states. While professional commitment has been investigated in terms of its impact on conflict, researchers have not investigated the possibility of a model of professional attitudes that mirrors organisational attitude models and attempts to predict professional turnover intentions. The conceptual model proposed in this study combines organisational and professional concepts into a single model with the goal of assessing the predictive ability of professional attitudes in conjunction with organisational attitudes with respect to organisational turnover intentions. Path analysis was used to estimate coefficients between related variables as an indication of direct relationships. Attitudes of governmental accountants were observed to be a complex set of relationships including professional as well as traditional organisational attitudes (job and professional satisfaction and organisational and professional commitments) as predictors of professional and organisational turnover intentions.

Accountant's Job Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis

“…McGregor et al (1989) US management accountants 201 19. Meixner & Bline (1989) US chief finance officers in state and 427 municipal government 20. Morrison (1993) US newly recruited audit staff in five large firms 149 21.…”

“…The indeterminants included in the meta-analyses involving accountants' JSAT in this paper were organizational commitment and professional commitment. For example, in some studies of accountants, organizational commitment has been specified as an antecedent of JSAT (see, for example, Aranya, Lachman & Amernic, 1982;Aranya & Ferris, 1983;Harrell, Chewing & Taylor, 1986;Lachman & Aranya, 1986a;Lachman & Aranya, 1986b); other studies have specified it as a consequence (see, for example, Meixner & Bline, 1989;Aryee, Wyatt & Min, 1991;Brierley & Turley, 1995), and another has specified them as being unrelated (McGregor, Killough & Brown, 1989). The specification of whether a construct is an antecedent or consequence of JSAT is not the purpose of this research, since meta-analysis is unable to determine the direction of causality between two constructs.…”

“…The relationship between accountants' turnover intentions and JSAT has been assessed in a number of ways, including the intention to leave the job (O'Driscoll & Beehr, 1994), to leave public practice (Collins & Killough, 1992), to leave the profession (Meixner & Bline, 1989) and long term career intentions (Harrell, 1990). Only the correlation involving JSAT with the intention to leave the organization, however, has been calculated sufficiently in prior empirical research to be included in the meta-analysis in this paper.…”

“…The samples of Aranya et al (1982), Aranya & Ferris, (1983) (sample of US CPAs), Lachman & Aranya (1986a) and Lachman & Aranya, (1986b) form part of the larger sample of Aranya & Ferria (1984) Independent samples have been included in each meta-analysis. The sample of governmental accountants of Bline, Duchon & Meixner (1991) is excluded from the meta-analysis because its correlations use the same data as Meixner & Bline (1989). When there has been a choice of sample to include in the meta-analysis the sample with the largest sample size has been included since this has the smallest sampling error.…”

“…As a consequence, the estimated population correlation variance was calculated by subtracting the sampling error variance of the corrected sample cor- Aryee et al (1991) 0.83 0.87 Brierley & Turley (1995) 0.868 0.846 Lachman & Aranya (1986b) 0.84 0.87 Meixner & Bline (1989) − a 0.89 Norris & Niebuhr (1984) 0.88 − b a A proxy reliability coefficient was substituted when JSAT was measured by one-item. The reported reliability coefficients for measures of accountants' JSAT of Ferris (1977), Lachman & Aranya (1986a), Lachman & Aranya (1986b), Bedeian et al (1988), Harrell & Eickhoff (1988) Harrell (1990, Rasch & Harrell (1990), Rebele & Michaels (1990), Aryee et al (1991), Hood & Koberg (1991), Snead & Harrell (1991), Collins & Killough (1992), Gregson, Wendell & Aono (1994), O'Driscoll & Beehr (1994), Brierley & Turley (1995), Smith, Davy & Everly (1995) and Pasewark & Strawser (1996) were adjusted to reliability coefficients for a one-item measure using the Spearman-Brown formula.…”