دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تحلیل رابطه بین انعطاف پذیری و کاهش کیفیت حسابرسی در پارادایم نقش استرس - الزویر 2017

ABSTRACT

This study examines the relation between individual resilience levels and reduced audit quality practices (RAQP) within the context of an expanded role stress model. The premise for this investigation is that while role stressors, stress arousal, and burnout may enhance the likelihood of RAQP, resilience has the potential to directly and indirectly reduce RAQP. This reduction in RAQP is hypothesized to be a consequence of resilience serving as an attenuating influence on the other factors. The sample consisted of 258 auditors from seven of the 10 largest US accounting firms in 2015. The expanded role stress model includes resilience, role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload as exogenous antecedents, stress arousal and burnout as mediators, and RAQP as the dependent variable. Our findings show that higher levels of resilience are associated with lower reported levels of RAQP, as well as decreases in both stress arousal and burnout tendencies. The data also indicate that reduced audit quality practices still represent a serious issue for the profession, but also identify ways by which firms may be able to reduce their occurrence. Emanating from these findings, we suggest future research to investigate viable intervention strategies designed to counteract the damaging effects of stress before they manifest in negative consequences to the individual and the firm.

8. Limitations and conclusions

The present investigation, like all cross-sectional studies that use self-report measures, has certain potential limitations. The use of a self-report measure might have subjected the tested relationships to the influence of common methods variance, or yielded questionable results due to poor instrument design. However, each of the instruments incorporated in this study have been proven valid and reliable in prior research and the confirmatory factor analyses support the theoretical meaningfulness of the latent constructs, thus indicating that the common method of data collection across variables does not explain their correlations and covariances with one another.15 In addition, the motivations of the volunteers for this study are uncertain.

The cross-sectional nature of the data also raises the concern of trajectory bias, i.e., that states, not traits, were measured, thereby raising speculation that the data would have supported other construct orderings. Therefore, despite the proposed theoretical model's predication on reasonably sound a priori theory and research, causal inferences must await confirmation by future longitudinally structured studies. The above-referenced limitations notwithstanding, this investigation makes noteworthy contributions to the ongoing effort to “respond to the need for analytically complex models to examine the interrelationships between role stress and job burnout, to psychological well-being and job outcomes” (Jones et al., 2010, 35). This study's inclusion of stress arousal addresses a need advanced by Chong and Monroe (2015) calling for the examination of other antecedents to job burnout. It also provides additional evidence to support Smith et al.'s (2006, 2007) findings that stress arousal and burnout are conceptually distinct constructs, and extends those findings to establish the conceptual distinctiveness of each of those constructs from that of resilience. Third, it provides empirical evidence to support the proposition that the worry and rumination aspects of stress arousal have a significant role to play in enhancing the traditional role stress model.