Does Auditor Resilience Mitigate the Effects of Multiple Team Memberships on Quality Threatening Behaviors?

Abstract

SUMMARY Audit firms rely on audit teams where memberships are frequently shared, shifted, and dissolved. In practice, this means that many auditors are part of multiple engagement teams for a given period of time. This paper examines why and when such multiple team memberships (MTMs) may lead auditors to engage in audit quality-threatening behaviors. We analyze data from a survey of 202 auditors—ranging from assistants to partners—working at Dutch audit firms. Our findings demonstrate that serving on MTMs can undermine auditor learning and in so doing leads auditors to engage in audit quality-threatening behaviors. Analyses show that less resilient auditors—those who are less able to bounce back from experienced difficulties—appear most susceptible to these deleterious effects. In addition, exploratory analyses suggest that the negative effect of serving on many MTMs appears to be more pronounced for field-level auditors than for management-level auditors.