Corresponding author: Bob van Kuijck (
Academic editor: Peter Hartog
Many studies have been performed on the interpretation of a person’s personality along the Five-factor model that includes the following traits: openness to experience, emotional stability, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness. However, very little research has been done specifically on the personality of internal auditors. This study tries to establish insight into the personality of internal auditors by comparing them with other professionals.
Based on a literature review and discussion, it is hypothesized whether or not the personality traits of internal auditors differ from those of other professionals. The hypotheses on each of the five factors have been tested for internal auditors and other professionals in The Netherlands.
Results show that, for four personality traits, the internal auditor’s personality is significantly different from other professionals; only the trait agreeableness shows no significant difference. Limitations of the study lie in its exploratory nature.
The results of this study help management of internal audit departments to optimize the assignment of roles and responsibilities to staff. Moreover, the insight into the personality traits of internal auditors also has important implications for the recruitment, selection, and training of internal auditors.
The traditional assumption about auditing is that the auditor processes information in an objective and independent manner (
Their research findings confirmed results from
In literature, much research can be found on the external auditor’s personality. However, little research has been carried out on the personality of internal auditors. Although there are many similarities between the work of internal and external auditors, there are also various differences in work content. As compared to external auditors, internal auditors are for example more involved in advisory activities and are more focused on operational processes, but less involved in financial auditing. Furthermore, as internal auditors often are employed by the company, independence and objectivity could possibly also be more precarious. These circumstances make that results from personality research in the external audit environment cannot be generalized to internal auditors in a straightforward manner. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to provide insight into the traits possessed by internal auditors and to explore how auditors in general might differ from other professionals. Furthermore, this study tries to discover a kind of personality profile of an internal auditor.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the background literature and hypotheses. Section 3 presents the research methods used, followed by the results in section 4. Section 5 contains the conclusions, discussion, implication for practical purposes, and suggestions for future research.
In this section, we discuss the Five-factor model and the
The Five-factor model (also known as the Big Five) is the generally accepted taxonomy for classifying personality (
This study uses the Five-factor model to discuss the internal auditor’s personality in detail. In the review of the dimensions, we use the traits as operationalized in the Personality for Professional Inventory (
In general, an audit can be described as an iterative process of audit activities comprising different interrelated phases (e.g. planning, fieldwork, evaluating audit evidence, reporting). In the Global Internal Audit Competency Framework, the Institute of Internal Auditors (
Internal auditors start their work after defining the objective and scope of an audit. They formulate a problem statement and audit questions that have to be addressed during the performance of the audit task within a certain timeframe. The objective of the audit determines the need for certain information that contributes to answering the formulated audit questions. Therefore, the auditor has to seek for relevant information during the audit.
According to
In most cases, the audit process that precedes an opinion or advice, is not observed by the end user (e.g. process owner, management). The only outcome comprises a report in written or oral form. An internal auditor, who expresses an opinion or gives advice, tries to persuade his or her audience of the audit findings and conclusions drawn. In practice, the combination of both written and oral presentation of audit findings and results is frequently used to increase the persuasiveness. In order to persuade end users, there are many ways to convince people (see also
The three areas identified above will be used in establishing the relationship between audit tasks and desirable personality traits that auditors according to literature preferably should have in order to achieve competent judgment performance.
In this section, we discuss the personality traits of internal auditors using the Five-factor model:
Openness to experience;
Neuroticism;
Conscientiousness;
Extraversion;
Agreeableness.
After a literature review and discussion, we present for each of the personality traits a hypothesis that predicts the difference in personality between internal auditors and other professionals with a similar level of education. Appendix
This trait includes the four sub-traits ‘
Usually, information during an audit comes from different sources and gradually becomes available. This can make individuals feel threatened by ambiguity in decision making situations (
In addition, there is evidence that a high score on openness to experience is positively correlated with specific types of information-search behavior, such as deep diving and broad scanning (
Broad scanning is an information-seeking strategy in which the auditor looks for information from many different sources to find confirming and disproving evidence. This helps to prevent the auditor from encountering biases in their judgment such as tunnel vision.
Finally,
Though we did not find evidence of a direct link between internal auditors’ personality and openness to experience from previous research, the discussion in this section reveals some expectations regarding this relationship.
We therefore formulate the following hypothesis:
This trait is also referred to as emotional stability, which sits on the other side of the neuroticism spectrum. It reflects sub-traits such as ‘
In practice, an auditor is initially confronted with uncertainty about the audit object. The task complexity is determined by the amount and clarity of the data as modeled by
Furthermore, the credibility of an auditor is crucial to the perceived quality of audits because it affects the decisions of others (see for example
Based on this literature review and discussion, we formulate the following hypothesis:
The sub-traits ‘
In the meta-study of
The following hypothesis is stated:
Characteristics relating to extraversion are ‘
The auditor performs a job that requires different personality traits in various phases of an audit.
In literature, we see however that there is evidence showing a positive correlation between extraversion and information seeking behavior (
In addition, research of
This leads to the following hypothesis:
The trait agreeableness (also described as altruism by
In the meta-study of
As result of the above discussion, we formulate a hypothesis that does not explicitly identify a difference:
In section 3.1, we discuss the design of the research study and the survey used. Section 3.2 describes the subjects who participated in the survey as well as the group of other professionals that has been used for comparison purposes. Finally, the data entry and initial analysis is discussed in section 3.3.
The study is based on the
The
We tried to strengthen the research design by promising in advance to participants that after completing the survey they would receive a report with a description of their own personality. By doing so, we expected to assure the accurately and sincerely answering of the survey. Moreover, we expected overall to boost the response rate of the survey.
Below, we describe the groups of internal auditors and other professionals. In order to compare the internal auditors with the other professionals, we use high level of education as distinguishing factor. Education is an important determinant of a competent professional as described in the Common Body of Knowledge (
Although we suggest that gender differences would not affect the findings in this study due to the assumption of
TalentLens entered the online survey data for the internal auditor group into Excel through a data-dump. This data was then imported into SPSS. A box-plot was used to detect any outliers and analyze any abnormalities in the data. One abnormality was found for age and this observation was removed from the dataset. Also two further outliers were detected with an impossible amount of work experience. Therefore, the further data-analyses were conducted on the 310 remaining subjects. Several graphical analyses were run to give insight into the spreads of scores in the internal auditor group.
TalentLens provided the researchers with access to the complete and detailed data set in SPSS, containing the complete dataset of the other professionals (at the same level as the internal auditors). The two datasets were merged in SPSS and apart from descriptive, homogeneity of variance tests and independent sample t-tests were performed on both the main traits and all underlying traits.
Table
The results show that four out of the five personality traits are higher for the internal auditor group. Moreover, these results were significant. Only for agreeableness the average score was lower for the internal auditors than for the other professionals. However, this difference was not significant.
Descriptive statistics.
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121.42 | 13.45 | 127.67 | 12.54 | 6.14*** |
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25.68 | 4.06 | 27.42 | 3.60 | 5.83*** |
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35.05 | 5.62 | 36.86 | 5.22 | 4.27*** |
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25.82 | 3.54 | 26.26 | 3.08 | 1.69 |
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34.87 | 5.35 | 37.13 | 4.83 | 5.65*** |
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112.84 | 18.82 | 122.67 | 16.51 | 7.13*** |
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27.54 | 6.69 | 24.22 | 6.00 | –6.72*** |
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25.94 | 3.74 | 27.78 | 2.94 | 6.94*** |
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26.07 | 6.12 | 23.41 | 5.61 | –5.78*** |
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20.52 | 5.63 | 22.52 | 5.01 | 4.80*** |
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101.48 | 14.45 | 106.52 | 11.76 | 4.92*** |
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33.59 | 6.22 | 35.74 | 5.47 | 4.69*** |
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35.23 | 5.93 | 37.15 | 5.04 | 4.43*** |
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32.67 | 5.86 | 33.63 | 5.07 | 2.27* |
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103.95 | 14.46 | 107.13 | 13.64 | 2.89** |
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25.78 | 4.23 | 25.40 | 4.37 | –1.14 |
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23.17 | 5.42 | 23.93 | 5.12 | 1.84 |
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33.03 | 4.88 | 34.44 | 4.33 | 3.89*** |
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21.97 | 4.59 | 23.36 | 4.00 | 4.12*** |
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123.64 | 13.19 | 122.38 | 11.96 | –1.29 |
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30.30 | 5.68 | 30.17 | 5.17 | –0.29 |
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32.21 | 3.57 | 32.31 | 2.95 | 0.39 |
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37.22 | 5.32 | 37.51 | 5.01 | 0.73 |
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24.51 | 5.72 | 22.73 | 5.26 | –4.14*** |
Note: The table presents the mean (µ) and standard deviation (σ) of the other professionals and the internal auditors on the five traits and underlying nineteen sub traits. The Independent Sample t Test (t) is used to compare the means of the two independent groups to determine whether the population means are significantly different. ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01 and *p < 0.05.
To test whether the differences indicated in the descriptives were significant and therefore lead to acceptance or rejection of the hypotheses, independent sample t-tests were performed. The t-tests were performed for each of the nineteen personality sub-traits that constitute the five main personality traits.
The results of the Levene’s test for homogeneity of variance showed homogeneity for extraversion and openness to experience. Therefore, the significance scores for the openness to experience and extraversion will be taken with ‘equal variances assumed’ and for the other three the ‘equal variances not assumed’ will be used. Variances show the spread of the data within the group, and the equality of variances show whether the two groups are evenly distributed (have a similar spread of scores). When this was not the case, the “equal variances not assumed” scores was used.
Section 5.1 discusses the conclusions on each of the five personality traits. In section 5.2, we present the implication for practice. Finally, section 5.3 describes the limitations and the suggestions for future research.
The central question in this study is whether internal auditors with respect to their personality are different from other professionals. The conclusion is that all hypotheses are accepted. Except for agreeableness, the four personality traits show higher levels for internal auditors as compared to the other professionals. Furthermore, the differences regarding extraversion are less convincing than for openness to experience, emotional stability and conscientiousness.
The results on the t-test for openness to experience show that the internal auditors score is significantly higher than the other professionals (p < 0.001). Furthermore, the sub-traits ‘
The sub-trait ‘
For emotional stability, the t-test showed that internal auditors do score significantly higher (p < 0.001) on this trait than the other professionals. All four underlying sub-traits also tested as significant (p < 0.001), though it should be noted that for the sub-trait ‘
The emotional stability of the internal auditors’ scores are significantly higher than the other professionals, leading to the acceptance of the hypothesis. However, the score was not exceptionally high in general (both scored in what could be called the medium range of the full score spectrum). Looking at the significance of the scores on the sub-traits, we see that internal auditors scored significantly higher on ‘
In section 2.3.2, several elements have been identified which are important for competent task performance of internal auditors. For example, the internal auditor´s personality is expected not to be ‘
The internal auditors scored significantly higher on conscientiousness than the other professionals (p < 0.001). This significance was also noted for all three of the underlying sub-traits of conscientiousness; ‘
The results show that the internal auditors on conscientiousness, overall as well as on the sub-traits, score significantly higher than the other professionals. People who score high on conscientiousness tend to have more self-discipline and control. When reviewing the results, this suggests that the internal auditors would indeed be less surprised by sudden problems. It should be noted that though the internal auditor score is significantly higher than the other professionals, both have a score in the medium range of the overall spectrum.
The t-test comparing of the scores on the extraversion trait between the internal auditors and the other professionals showed that internal auditors scored significantly higher on this trait than the other professionals (p < 0.01). The underlying sub-traits ‘
The sub-traits ‘
Moreover, we assume that ‘
The personality trait of agreeableness (altruism) did not show a significant difference. The hypothesis 5 can therefore be accepted. Within the sub-traits of agreeableness, only ‘
The results regarding agreeableness did not reveal significant differences between the internal auditors and the other professionals. In advance, it was assumed that no significant difference would be present on this particular trait. However, the sub-trait ‘
In practice, the insights that have been revealed in this study may have relevant implications for recruitment, performance management and training of internal auditors. From the exploratory research, we can conclude that internal auditors score significantly different as opposed to other professionals. It appears that there is a kind of general profile for internal auditors which differs from other professionals on several elements. If the personality of internal auditors can be adequately charted through a survey such as the
Using a personality survey could help in predicting whether someone will be able to perform internal audit work adequately.
In addition to the use in recruitment, the results could be used in the training of internal auditors, knowing where to focus and to concentrate on areas of potential weaknesses. Also, through analysis of the personality traits on which internal auditors score high (for example more action orientated), it could be easier to set up tailored training sessions which are effective; this has also been implied in a meta-analysis performed by Barrick and Mount (2006) for a general population of professionals.
The literature reviews showed that limited research has been done in the field of the internal auditor’s personality. In addition, this empirical study shows that there are differences between internal auditors and other professionals. These conclusions itself may already be a reason to extend research in this relatively unexplored research area. Besides this general suggestion for future research, we focus on five particular points of research interest.
Firstly, the exploratory research was solely carried out in The Netherlands. In order to validate the findings of this study, the research should be expanded to other countries.
Secondly, an important question for further research is whether internal auditors are different in their personality traits due to the learning process and experiences in the auditing profession, or whether people who choose to become internal auditor tend to be people with certain personality traits. To analyze this, it would be interesting to look at differences between auditors with very little work experience and those with a broad experience. We can see from other research that there are differing results in trait development or the lack thereof. A study by
Thirdly, the study should expand to various aspects of internal auditor’s work that become more relevant in senior positions within the internal audit profession. These aspects relate for example to leadership in internal auditing, ethical reasoning and conflict handling. The analysis should establish whether or not the identified differences are strengthened or may lead to completely other conclusions. Moreover, it could refine the insight into the degree to which the sub-traits should be present in a certain situation.
Fourthly, the element of gender is not specifically elaborated on in this paper and should be topic of further investigation. The results showed that female internal auditors are more similar to their male internal auditors than is the case of other professionals. This is strong evidence in support of the Attraction-Selection-Attrition model (see section 3.1). However, the detailed analysis of the current group of internal auditors also revealed some differences between men and women, most notably on emotional stability. Previous research also suggests differences between men and women on various personality traits, especially in European and American culture (
The final suggestion refers to the use of other research methods in addition to (self-scoring) surveys in studying personality. The current study focused on the use of a personality survey as a tool to analyze differences in personalities. However, surveys do have limitations (
We mainly thank the research foundation of
It is important to note that there is a difference between personality traits and states, as states often refer to mood states rather than to actual personality traits as they are meant in this paper.
Although this instrument is subject to considerable criticism (
These five factors differ from those eventually incorporated in the Five-factor model.
They removed the sub-traits ‘control’ and ‘pro-activeness’ from the original twenty-one indicators because they were redundant.
See
We abstract from other aspects that may be require specific personality traits (e.g. conflict handling, negotiation, leadership).
For a better understanding of intolerance of uncertainty,
In the study of
The
The following nineteen personality sub-traits and categorisation is based on the description provided by
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