An empirical evaluation of the interpersonal and organisational correlates of professionalism in internal auditing

Abstract

This study was designed to evaluate the extent of professional attitudes in internal auditors and to identify their association with interpersonal and organisational conditions of internal auditing. For these purposes, the generic features of internal auditing jobs were used to evaluate how the internal audit function is designed, and role stressors were used to capture expectations of role senders. It was hypothesised that job characteristics would generally be negatively associated with role stress and positively related to professionalism. Furthermore, role stress was hypothesised to be negatively related to professionalism. At a practice level, the results indicate that autonomy, feedback, and task significance from the set of job characteristics, and role conflict and role ambiguity from role stress, are related to some of the dimensions of professionalism. Only the relationships between role conflict and two professionalism dimensions were not in the hypothesised direction. The strongest support for the hypothesised relationship between job characteristics and role stress was found for skill variety, autonomy, and feedback. All were significantly related to all dimensions of role stress. However, skill variety was positively related to each dimension of stress. The results indicate that a complex set of work design factors have selective importance for creating and maintaining professional attitudes and behaviours of internal auditors.