Audit senior associates are essential to audit production, yet we know little about how they experience their organizational role. We interview 45 U.S.-based audit seniors and find they experience persistent paradoxical tensions between contradictory yet interrelated objectives, stemming from their middle hierarchical position as both experienced associates and novice executives. Applying Paradox Theory, we find seniors sometimes work around paradox by attending to one paradoxical objective to temporarily alleviate tension but leave the other paradoxical objective neglected. Other times, seniors work through paradox by dynamically engaging with both paradoxical objectives, particularly when empowered by perceiving adequate resources—time, information, and social capital. Our study reconceptualizes seniors as self-directed fledgling leaders whose capabilities are forged through navigating paradoxical tensions, expanding the conventional academic view of seniors as experienced associates. We discuss how audit firm-level tensions revealed through seniors’ experiences offer insights for human capital development and audit quality.

The audit environment operates using an apprenticeship model, where more experienced auditors are responsible for the training and development of junior auditors. Academic research has investigated this model primarily as a quality control mechanism for the subordinate’s work product. In contrast, we investigate what effect the apprenticeship model has on supervising auditors. We theorize that coaching an apprentice activates norms that are accompanied by an ideal audit quality focus. In an experiment with experienced auditors, we find that salient apprenticeship norms result in a higher-quality sample selection. Although work-life conflict has an overall negative effect on quality, we find no evidence that apprenticeship norms attenuate this effect. Finally, auditors faced with client pressure improve the quality of their subsequent inventory testing selections only when apprenticeship norms are salient. Our findings expand our understanding of the ways the traditional audit environment encourages quality behavior, with important implications for research and practice.