رابطه ی رهبری مشتری تحول گرا و بی طرفی حسابرس The relationship between transformational client leadership and auditor objectivity

1. Introduction Accounting research has provided substantial evidence of the impact of financial incentives on auditor objectivity (e.g. Salterio, 1996; Mayhew et al., 2001; Kadous et al., 2003; Umar and Anandarajan, 2004; Hollingsworth and Li, 2012). This body of research has been extended to consider non-financial incentives, as advocated by Bamber and Iyer (2007). Their findings suggest that auditors tend to identify with their client firms and that client identification is negatively related to auditor objectivity. This effect has been confirmed, and the results have been extended by recent research (Stefaniak et al., 2012; Bauer, 2015; Svanberg and Öhman, 2015). The dramaturgy is not so much about the shift of focus from financial to non-financial dependence-related factors as about the implication that auditors’ social identities appear highly relevant to the audit context. The importance of social identities can be understood with the aid of leadership research, which describes leadership as a process that derives its effectiveness to a substantial extent from follower identity. In essence, this means that it is easier to influence individuals if they identify with a collective to which the leadership is relevant. Since accounting research has found that auditors tend to identify with their client firms, they may be affected by client leadership. This study focuses on transformational leadership, which has been one of the most empirically examined types of leadership over the past 30 years (van Knippenberg and Sitkin, 2013), and on whether the extent to which auditors perceive the chief financial officers of their largest clients (the client’s CFO) as transformational is associated with the impairment of auditor objectivity. The leadership literature argues that the more that followers identify with a group, the more susceptible these followers are to transformational leadership (Howell and Shamir, 2005). Extensive research also demonstrates that transformational leadership increases the tendency of followers to identify with the leader’s group or organization (Conger et al., 2000; Shamir et al., 2000; Duck and Fielding, 2003). Several studies have reported that collective identification partially mediates the impact of transformational leadership on follower behavior (e.g. Conger et al., 2000; De Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2002; Kark et al., 2003). Even though auditors and clients are not members of the same organization, the fact that auditors identify with their clients provides reason to suspect that auditors are susceptible to transformational client leadership. We apply a cross-sectional design in order to study the association between auditor perception of transformational client leadership and auditor judgment. We ask each auditor to imagine a scenario concerning his or her largest client in which the auditor thinks that an accounting issue concerning unrecorded liabilities is material, however, the client disagrees. We measure the auditor’s lack of objectivity as his or her degree of acceptance of the client’s point of view; we ask the auditor to imagine the leader in client management responsible for the client firm’s financial reports (i.e. the CFO) when completing an instrument measuring transformational client leadership, and we measure the auditor’s client identification using a measurement instrument validated in previous research. We anticipate that higher levels of perceived transformational client leadership will be associated with a more lenient audit judgment than will lower levels. We also expect this association to be mediated by the extent to which auditors identify with their clients’ firms. Our results indicate that higher levels of perceived transformational client leadership are associated with more lenient audit judgments than are lower levels, and that this association is partially mediated by the strength of auditors’ client identification.