دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی دیدگاه مدیریت خطا در کیفیت حسابرسی: به سوی یک مدل چند سطحی - الزویر 2017

abstract

We take an error management perspective on audit quality. Drawing on 18 months of participant observations and 38 interviews conducted in a Big 4 accounting firm, we develop a multi-level model of error management. With this model, we propose how organizational structures, team procedures and practices, and individual cognitions and emotions interact to manage errors. The multi-level model of error management allows us to conceptually integrate previous behavioral and social research on audit quality, contributes to the rising accounting firm error management literature, and explains how and why two general approaches from the broader error management literature to errors that are usually considered as opposing each other, i.e., error prevention and error resilience, may interact and actually entail each other in accounting firms.

6. Concluding discussion

In this paper, we have suggested that taking an error management perspective may be an insightful lens to develop an understanding of how audit quality is produced within accounting firms. Drawing on a comprehensive case study including extensive fieldwork of 18 months of participant observation, 38 interviews, and archival materials, we have proposed a multi-level model of error management in accounting firms. This model explains that to understand the operational production of audit quality within audit teams, it is crucial to consider both the role of formal error prevention and the role of informal error resilience, along with how the two interact across multiple levels of analysis. In particular, this research suggests that we should pay more attention to error management as a multi-level interaction system because the components of the multi-level model are supplementing and complementing each other and may neither work nor be studied properly in isolation. In short, error management becomes selfreinforcing when coherent and coordinated, and disruptive when fragmented and undermined by contradictory practices and arrangements.

This study makes several overarching contributions to the audit quality and error management literatures. First, the multi-level model of error management contributes to the behavioral and social audit quality literature by pointing to a conceptual integration of discussions in the literature on the role of organizational quality control structures (e.g., Malone & Roberts, 1996), team workpaper review and feedback procedures (e.g., Ramsay, 1994; Westermann et al., 2015), shared team resilient practices (e.g., Gold et al., 2014; Gronewold & Donle, 2011), and individual cognitions and emotions (e.g., Guenin-Paracini et al., 2014 ). These streams had mostly been thought of and discussed in isolation, despite indications of interactions. The multi-level model of error management suggests a way forward toward systematically integrating the multiple insights in the literature by showing how QRM structures, prevention procedures such as workpaper reviews, individual error orientation, and resilient practices interact. Accordingly, we hope that the multi-level model of error management opens a fruitful alley for future research by applying this novel framework to how audit quality is produced in practice