Dominant personality types in public accounting: selection bias or indoctrinated?

ABSTRACT

Prior studies concerning the personality type and preferences of accountants generally draw conclusions based upon the reports of either practicing accountants, or accounting students, at a single point in time. So while much is known about the personality type of accountants in general, left unexplored is the question of whether public accountants are selected or indoctrinated. Using a Jungian-based personality inventory administered to experienced public accountants, and to accounting students in both their final year of study and three years' postgraduation, we provide empirical evidence of hiring selection bias. Further, the personality preferences of recruits that remain in public accounting appear to evolve to more closely match the personality preferences of experienced public accountants, while the personality preferences of recruits that leave public accounting are unchanged. These results have important implications for individuals seeking to enter public accounting careers, recruiters, educators, and career counselors.

KEYWORDS:

• Accountants' personalities
• indoctrination
• hiring selection bias
• Insights Discovery Personal Profile

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Insights (insights.com) who provided proprietary personality inventories of our study's participants at no cost. We are also grateful to various workshop participants and several anonymous reviewers of prior versions of this manuscript and other papers that include interim reports of portions of our study's data, none of which are directly pertinent to this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Data extracted from the Audit Analytics Database indicate that the number of restatements was 838, 857, 856, and 854, in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, respectively.

2 There are at least two studies prior to Shackleton (1980) – DeCoster and Rhode (1971) and Amernic, Aranya, and Pollock (1979) – but the results of those studies are not easily comparable to the studies discussed herein, as they use alternative measures of personality preference and are focused on comparisons to anecdotal, stereotypical descriptions of accountants.

3 Myers-Briggs Foundation, available at: http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/.

4 In contrast, using an abridged form of the MBTI, Blay and Fennema (2012) found that accounting majors were only more likely to be sensing and thinking, than their non-accounting major counterparts.

5 Available at: www.insights.com/2119/validating-insights-discovery.html.

6 Recent empirical evidence suggests that personality type and intelligence are not correlated (Waiyavutti, Deary, & Ian, 2012).