Is Accounting a Miserable Job?

Abstract

The accounting profession is sustained by an ongoing supply of recruits who must be highly capable to complete the training required of new accountants. Such people have many career options open to them and those who enter accounting and remain in the field choose it over other attractive careers when they believe accounting is a better fit for them than available alternatives. Different people have different personalities, abilities, and values, and these individual-level traits are fundamental guides driving their judgments and decisions, including judgments about which job attributes seem most important and decisions about which career to pursue. In this study, we use several large, publicly available datasets describing random samples of Americans to empirically study which individual-level traits are associated with self-selection into the accounting profession and how this non-random sorting of people into accounting careers influences which job attributes accountants consider most important. We show that people who become accountants value material job attributes, like pay, significantly more than other workers and value self-transcending job attributes, like serving society, significantly less. The most direct practical implication of our findings is that accounting organizations working to recruit and retain accountants would likely produce better results if they invested less in efforts to convince accountants that their jobs are exciting and can “change the world” and redirected these investments into efforts to highlight and enhance the material rewards of accounting careers.