Overcoming Communication Challenges: Can Taking the Specialist's Perspective Improve Auditors' Critical Evaluation and Integration of the Specialist's Work?

Abstract

This study investigates how communication complexity (i.e., the presentation of technical information) in the expert’s advice can impact auditor integration of evidence. We document that holding constant the information content, readability, and understandability of the expert’s advice, but varying only the degree of its communication complexity in presentation influences auditors’ critical evaluation and integration of the expert’s advice – a key concern for audit regulators worldwide. After establishing that auditors’ processing of evidence is lower when communication complexity is high versus when it is low, we provide evidence that prompting them to take the expert’s perspective improves their critical evaluation and integration of the expert’s advice, given high communication complexity. Thus, this study provides the first evidence that presentation of technical information, separate from auditors’ understanding of it, inhibits their processing of the expert’s evidence but adopting an expert’s perspective even when the users (auditors) are at an expertise disadvantage can enhance judgments and decision-making. Accordingly, these results, consistent with predictions based on communication and perspective-taking theories, have implications for regulators, auditors, and agents interested in enhancing collaboration in cross-functional teams with diverse expertise.