{"title":"The power of small talk: How small talk and psychological ownership influence managers’ communication defensiveness during audit inquiry","authors":"Nikki L. MacKenzie , Christopher P. Agoglia","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2025.101592","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2025.101592","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The audit process requires frequent communication between auditors and client managers. Often, the most knowledgeable managers are involved in the work relating to an audit inquiry. As such, they may feel a sense of “ownership” over the related work. When threatened, psychological ownership can cause individuals to behave defensively, which may pose a challenge for auditors. Theory suggests that how auditors begin these inquiries (e.g., using small talk) may influence managers' behavior. Through two experiments, we find that managers with higher psychological ownership are more likely to respond defensively to an audit inquiry relating to a potential inventory obsolescence issue. Additionally, we find that the use of professional small talk magnifies managers’ defensive responses and some evidence that social small talk helps mitigate defensive responses. Further, small talk improves the perceived rapport between the manager and the auditor, compared to no small talk.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 101592"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143800100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shaping collective action in financial markets through popular expertise: An analysis of Due Diligence posts on WallStreetBets","authors":"Yves Gendron , Alexandre Madelaine , Luc Paugam , Hervé Stolowy","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101588","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101588","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In 2021, a social movement rallying retail investors unexpectedly shocked Wall Street, forcing a prominent multi-billion-dollar hedge fund to shut down one year later, after incurring massive financial losses. Social movements in financial markets have significantly developed in the wake of the 2007–09 financial crisis, resulting in the emergence of various collective actions. We analyze one recent example of such action undertaken by the r/WallStreetBets (WSB) community on Reddit, which disrupted the stock prices of several “meme stocks” (e.g., GameStop) by disseminating influential investment narratives. We analyze the 150 most upvoted Due Diligence posts on WSB and interview eight members of its community. We find that a popular expertise in investment narratives emerged, developed, and was propagated on this digital platform. WSB authors' claim to popular expertise is made in a hybrid language combining traditional financial expertise with an accessible and entertaining writing style, complemented by references to pop culture. Our analysis brings out a growing resentment among retail investors about the unfairness of financial markets, and its role in mobilizing them for collective action that challenged the existing order of things. Yet this widespread resentment did not spontaneously translate into a meaningful, sustainable collective action initiative. Our thesis is that the development of popular expertise played an instrumental role in the formation of WSB's collective action initiative targeting several perceived investment opportunities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 101588"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143511551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The effects of performance-based incentive frequency on collusion","authors":"Ashley K. Sauciuc","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2025.101591","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2025.101591","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A common set of problematic conditions exist across many of the most egregious cases of collusion in recent decades (e.g., Enron, WorldCom, Wells Fargo), including weak internal control systems, intense pressure to reach nearly impossible targets, and social pressure that encourages employees to trade their own morals to conform with group norms. I capture this core set of conditions in a carefully designed laboratory experiment to examine whether and how an important element of compensation contracting—incentive frequency—may foster adverse norms. Specifically, I predict and find that incentive frequency influences how individuals rationalize collusion, thereby affecting the reporting norms that develop within groups. Groups with relatively infrequent incentives oscillate between collusion and truthful reporting, consistent with moral licensing behavior; whereas frequent incentives produce a spillover effect whereby collusion persists, consistent with ethical erosion. These results have important implications for compensation design and the use of management control systems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 101591"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143420350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Therese Grohnert , Wim H. Gijselaers , Roger H.G. Meuwissen , Ken T. Trotman
{"title":"The effects of a supportive learning culture and rank on professional skepticism in information search","authors":"Therese Grohnert , Wim H. Gijselaers , Roger H.G. Meuwissen , Ken T. Trotman","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2025.101590","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2025.101590","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Auditors at all ranks should be skeptical when searching for information throughout audits. However, we lever domain learning theory from educational psychology to posit that their skepticism unlikely develops evenly across ranks, but rather depends on a supportive learning culture, a construct from the management literature. To test that perceived learning culture moderates the association between auditor rank and skeptical information search, we use a laboratory study with 166 Dutch auditors at a Big 4 firm and follow-up interviews with seven top leaders of that firm. A more supportive perceived learning culture is associated with more skeptical information search, but only in audit managers and partners - not in associates and seniors. Interviewees attribute this pattern to values acquired over time through socialization, role expectations, knowledge development, and wider task characteristics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 101590"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143162850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Navigating the spectrum of aggressiveness: Social dynamics and anxieties in tax planning","authors":"Marion Brivot, Suzanne Paquette, Zachary Huxley","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2025.101589","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2025.101589","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This qualitative inquiry investigates how tax professionals understand aggressiveness in tax planning and how they position themselves on the spectrum of aggressiveness. Based on semi-structured interviews with 33 experienced Canadian tax professionals from top-10 accounting and law firms, we find that tax professionals understand aggressiveness through a web of inter-related considerations. These include creativity, complexity, legal ambiguity, and lucrativeness, associated with risks of tax audits, technical errors, disputes with tax authorities over legal interpretations, and reputational damage for the client, the tax professional, and their firm. These considerations and related risks are often a source of anxiety for tax professionals. Drawing on contemporary philosopher Charlie Kurth's distinction between “punishment anxiety” and “practical anxiety,” we identify an intricate interplay between these two forms of anxiety and a collective deliberation process involving clients and colleagues, each bringing their own risk-reward preferences, which shapes professionals' decisions of how aggressive they should be. The socio-affective conceptualization of aggressiveness that we propose in this study contributes to the tax literature by deepening our understanding of the elusive concept of tax aggressiveness. It also enriches the broader literature on accounting and finance professionals' emotions at work by documenting the analytical value of a nuanced understanding of anxiety. Furthermore, it advances the professional ethics literature by highlighting the moral significance of practical anxiety in professional judgment about risky, ethically sensitive issues.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 101589"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143162545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chad Stefaniak , Bryan Stikeleather , Nathan Waddoups
{"title":"The effect of different approaches to administering a fixed wage raise on employee productivity","authors":"Chad Stefaniak , Bryan Stikeleather , Nathan Waddoups","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101587","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101587","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Firms frequently implement pay increases as a critical part of the management control system. We investigate how controllable factors related to the timing of such increases affect employee productivity. In practice, significant variation exists between when firms (i) announce a pay increase, (ii) quantify it, and (iii) make it effective. These events can occur concurrently (i.e., in the same pay period) or sequentially at different points in time (i.e., spread across several pay periods). We posit that varying the temporal separation of these events can affect employees’ effort and pattern of productivity. Via an experiment, we find employees respond to concurrent pay increases by initially providing high levels of effort that nonetheless diminishes significantly over time. In contrast, we find that they respond to sequential pay increases with a smaller but more persistent increase in effort, leading to equivalent levels of total output at a lower total compensation cost. However, our study also documents that employees have less satisfaction with the timing of the raise for sequential compared to concurrent raises. Our study provides insights for theory and practice regarding the benefits and costs of concurrent versus sequential raises.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 101587"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2024-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143162851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What you are versus what you do: The effect of noun-verb framing in earnings conference calls","authors":"Yanjia Yang , Hun-Tong Tan","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101573","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101573","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A firm can choose to use nouns (e.g., “our company is a <em>provider</em> of personalized services”) or verbs (e.g., “our company <em>provides</em> personalized services”) in its disclosures without substantially altering the content of disclosures. We present theory and evidence from three experiments related to how noun-verb framing affects investors' judgments. Our first experiment shows that investors' judgments of a firm with stable-trend financial performance are more favorable when the firm's disclosures are framed using nouns rather than verbs; the reverse is found for a firm with growing-trend financial performance. We conduct two supplementary experiments to test the associated causal chain. The findings inform managers, investors, and regulators on how word choices made by firms impact investors.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"113 ","pages":"Article 101573"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2024-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142419289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Harry Evans , Mark (Shuai) Ma , Yucheng (John) Yang
{"title":"Seeking justice: Inequitable management compensation and employee whistleblowing","authors":"J. Harry Evans , Mark (Shuai) Ma , Yucheng (John) Yang","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101576","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101576","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Prompted by high pay disparity within firms, many employees have raised concerns about the equity of management compensation. This study examines the relation between employees’ perceptions of inequitable management compensation and their whistleblowing behavior. We expect that when employees feel more strongly that management compensation is inequitable and unjust, they are more motivated to blow the whistle on potential management misconduct. Consistent with this expectation, we find that firms with higher CEO pay ratios are more likely to experience employee whistleblowing of alleged misconduct in the following year. This positive association is stronger when employees are more likely to perceive a high CEO pay ratio as being unjust. We also provide several tests to mitigate concerns about alternative explanations based on corporate culture or underlying fraud and to support the assumptions underlying our arguments. In addition, our results are robust to alternative measures of within-firm pay disparity. Overall, our findings identify potentially positive aspects of high pay disparity within a firm because its employees are more motivated to monitor management through whistleblowing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"113 ","pages":"Article 101576"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2024-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142419290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The impact of descriptor identicalness on investors' judgements of managers’ opportunistic estimation choices","authors":"Ling L. Harris , Elaine Y. Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101575","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101575","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We conduct two experiments to examine how descriptor identicalness influences investors' assessments of managers' opportunistic estimation choices. We manipulate the identicalness of descriptors (<em>identical</em> versus <em>non-identical</em>) and managers' opportunistic estimation choices (<em>more</em> versus <em>less opportunistic</em>). We find that investors are better able to integrate information when managers use identical descriptors in their disclosures than when managers use non-identical descriptors. We also find that investors who observe identical descriptors tend to make <em>less</em> favorable investment judgments when managers' estimation choices are more (versus less) opportunistic, whereas those presented with non-identical descriptors are less likely to discern between more and less opportunistic estimation choices. Lastly, our supplemental analyses indicate that descriptor identicalness facilitates information integration, which in turn moderates the impact of managers' estimation choices on investors’ credibility assessments and subsequent investment judgments. Our findings have important implications for regulators, managers, and investors, shedding light on how investors use and incorporate accounting disclosures into their investment decision-making processes.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"113 ","pages":"Article 101575"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142270960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bringing morality back in: Accounting as moral interlocutor in reflective equilibrium processes","authors":"Kalle Kraus , Anette Mikes , Carissa Véliz","doi":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101570","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.aos.2024.101570","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The situations in which accounting is practiced raise moral concerns about customer and employee safety, community welfare, environmental sustainability, and human rights. Traditional accounting practices, such as budgets and performance measurement systems, have been widely regarded as ‘crowding out morality’ by objectifying the people affected by a firm's actions. In two North American utilities, we observed a stepwise structured process of moral reflection (which we identify as an instance of Rawls's reflective equilibrium approach), in which accounting, in the form of the risk appetite radar, helped guide executive decision making informed by moral principles. We develop two dimensions of accounting's role as ‘moral interlocutor’: enabling organizational value consensus and organizational value coherence. We identify three features of the observed accounting practice that enable it to act as moral interlocutor: subjectification rather than objectification of potential victims of the firm's actions; de-monetization, that is, considering trade-offs in terms of multiple organizational values, not only in terms of cost; and visualization of the organizations' moral principles on value priorities and how they are shaped by organizational decision making and action. The accounting visualizations did not only enable executives' reflection on rights and wrongs, but also triggered a fuller and richer moral vocabulary that was used for complex decision making involving, for instance, automation and the risk of suicides.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48379,"journal":{"name":"Accounting Organizations and Society","volume":"113 ","pages":"Article 101570"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368224000308/pdfft?md5=c48646897ce1e98b87b2d805c3ef00f5&pid=1-s2.0-S0361368224000308-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142162107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}