Why do some auditors thrive while others struggle? A multiple team memberships perspective

Auditors typically need to work on several audit engagements simultaneously within a specific time period, e.g., busy season when audit clients’ annual financial statements need to be audited. This dissertation examines the advantages and disadvantages of auditors being part of several teams at the same time. The key advantage for auditors in this situation is that auditors can have access to resources (including but not limited to specific accounting/auditing standards, industrial knowledge, tax, IT, etc.) from their fellow colleagues. The results of this thesis demonstrates that auditors working in various audit engagements can facilitate themselves to seek important audit knowledge on one hand, and increase their compensation on the other hand. However, this situation also comes with a cost, because working on multiple audit engagements simultaneously can cause demands (including but not limited to higher workload, pressures, attention fragmentation) for auditors. These demands may undermine auditors’ opportunities to learn during audit engagements, which in turn results in unethical behaviors that undermine audit quality. In sum, these findings have important implications for audit firms to staff audit engagements. Audit firms need to consider the conditions under which auditors can benefit from resources while at the same time auditors can reduce the demands that arise from serving too many engagements.