Aflevering Farview #25 Lena Pieper On “What Makes Audit Partners And Their Teams Successful?”

In this 25th FARview podcast, PhD student Lena Pieper (Maastricht University) presents the basic ideas underlying her dissertation, which will be defended in 2023. The broad research question of het PhD-study is ‘what makes audit partners and their teams successful?’ In the podcast, Lena clarifies the importance of the audit team and zooms in on the essential role that the audit partner plays (also in combination, or ‘dyad’, with the audit manager). Of course, there is ample attention for the contribution of research in this area. Lena draws on insights from the fields of psychology and organizational behavior. Her dissertation encompasses three different levels. First, she examines audit partners’ and managers’ personality characteristics and how these characteristics affect their individual job performance. Second, she investigates the partner-manager ‘dyad’ and its functioning. At the third level, she investigates different aspects of audit team functioning and how the team is influenced by the partner-manager dyad. Her research contributes to the academic literature in several ways. With the comprehensive data set from practicing audit teams and their leaders, the studies advance the understanding of the factors that influence the functioning of an engagement team. This is important because the audit is ultimately conducted by a team rather than by one individual and a well-functioning engagement team is crucial for audit quality. The studies also have practical implications for the audit firms. The findings can help the firms to manage and compose their audit teams in a more scientific way to improve the performance of the audit teams, and ultimately audit quality. With her research, Lena hopes to contribute to the vision ‘accounting as a learned profession’, where research helps auditors to enhance audit quality.