The effect of gender and firm identification on auditor pre-negotiation judgments

Abstract

This paper extends current auditor negotiation research by considering the effects of two dimensions of auditors' identity that are posited to be relevant to auditors' negotiation: gender and audit firm identification. Women earn over half of college degrees in accounting, and hold more than half of accounting and auditing positions in the US, yet the balance of the gender of partners at audit firms is currently not equal (AICPA, 2017). However, as more women advance into partnership positions in firms, it is increasingly important to have an understanding of how gender affects the behaviors, processes and outcomes of negotiation, and thus the quality of financial statements. The auditor-client negotiation context has features, such as ambiguity and representation of others that can “trigger” the salience of auditors' gender and firm identity. Once salient, these two dimensions of auditors' identity shape auditors' motivational orientation towards negotiations, which, in turn, affects the auditors' negotiation behavior and negotiation outcomes.The study finds that male and female auditors approach the negotiation over audit adjustments differently. Although many negotiation studies find that males negotiate more aggressively than do females, auditor-client negotiation offers a unique setting that has been found to reverse this common trend. We hypothesize and find that female auditors recommend higher audit adjustments than males. However, the level of firm identification moderates female's recommended audit adjustments such that at higher levels of firm identification, the larger audit adjustments recommended by females decrease. This finding is consistent with the growing research on gender differences in auditing and the research on gender and risk tolerance, which find females to be more risk averse, but contrary to much of the negotiation research which shows males as more aggressive and achieving higher negotiated outcomes. In supplemental analysis, we find that our results hold in the senior manager subsample but not in the partner subsample. This result is consistent with theory on gender differences which suggests that the differences will disappear with increased occupational socialization (Smith & Rogers, 2000). Practical implications are discussed.