Mohammad J. Abdolmohammadi
Bentley College
D. Gerald Searfoss
University of Utah
James Shanteau
Kansas State University
Abstract: Prior research in psychology and auditing has established that in addition to ability, experience and knowledge, many other attributes such as confidence and communication skills are also important to expertise. The literature also suggests that the importance of various expert attributes differ by professional rank. This study extends this literature by providing evidence on an expanded list of attributes of top industry audit specialists (TIAS). Specifically, the study elicits data from 114 senior audit partners known to be TIASs by their Big-Five accounting firm. These TIASs generated an extensive list of attributes of TIASs in an open-ended questionnaire and assessed their importance. They also assessed the importance of each attribute in a 25 pre-defined list that included five distracter items. Our findings confirm the importance of various attributes reported in the expertise literature, but also presents attributes not reported in prior literature. For example, in addition tot the familiar attributes in the literature, the open ended questionnaire generated evidence on the importance of many other attributes that can broadly classified as leadership, marketing, and accepted-as-authority characteristics. The findings are robust and applicable to various industry specializations because we found very little evidence of differences between industries. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Back to Program
