Professional skepticism is an essential element of a healthy audit. In this study, we present a framework in which the two elements of professional skepticism—skeptical judgment and skeptical action—differ in that skeptical judgment involves paying attention to audit risks, whereas skeptical action often involves overcoming personal risks. This distinction suggests that the optimal conditions for skeptical judgment may differ from the optimal conditions for converting that judgment to skeptical action. Specifically, interventions that promote vigilance will facilitate judgment because they make potential accounting issues salient, but such a focus will also draw attention to potential adverse consequences of taking action. To test this proposition, we conduct two studies in which we align skeptical judgment and skeptical action with two pairs of distinct and contrasting mindsets to operationalize differential vigilance. Our results suggest a duality in skepticism which has important implications for researchers and practitioners designing interventions to improve audit quality.

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.

Auditors often face situations in which acting on their professional obligations comes with potential personal costs. Drawing upon the Theory of Reputation in Organizations, we predict that perceived costs associated with these actions are lower for auditors with positive reputations, which, in turn, influences their actions. In our first experiment, participants perceive that auditors with negative reputations face a more constrained choice set when anticipating a budget overage. Further, participants perceive that those with positive reputations are more likely to proactively report the overage and less likely to underreport hours worked, a result mediated by the anticipated impact on evaluations for “speaking up.” In a second experiment, we manipulate reputation in a live simulation and demonstrate a causal link between reputation and auditors' skeptical action. Taken together, our experiments provide evidence that an auditor's perceived reputation influences their choice to engage in audit quality enhancing behaviors.