This article synthesizes research on auditors’ ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ personality traits. Our systematic literature review identified 34 studies that met our inclusion criteria. These studies provide insights into auditors’ personality traits, their impact on audit quality, and their association with various professional behaviors and outcomes. Our review emphasizes the importance of understanding personality traits and considering them in the recruitment phase and throughout an auditor’s career. Recognizing the variation in auditors’ personalities and understanding their interplay within audit practices are relevant for improving and refining the profession.

Personality traits, auditors, audit profession

This article is relevant for practice as it could help audit firms make informed decisions regarding talent recruitment, workforce assignment to clients, and the professional development of their human capital. By understanding the association between auditors’ personality traits and their behavior, audit quality, and client interactions, firms can match auditors with appropriate tasks, enhance audit outcomes, and improve client relationships. Research on auditors’ personalities provides valuable insights for optimizing the allocation of audit personnel, ultimately benefiting the efficiency and effectiveness of auditing practice.

This article synthesizes research on auditors’ personality traits, aiming to provide insights to audit firms and academics about the current state of knowledge. Research in psychology consistently demonstrates the association between an individual’s personality and their behavior in the workplace. Personality is associated with vocational choices, work performance, and various professional outcomes (such as promotions) (Barrick and Mount 1991; Holland 1959; Lent et al. 1994). However, generalizing these findings to the audit profession is not apparent without empirical testing due to the unique characteristics of professional service firms (Von Nordenflycht 2010).¹Hence, accounting researchers have begun studying auditors’ personalities to understand the role of personality traits in the audit profession. Despite the vast body of psychology research, research on auditors’ personality traits has, until recently, remained scarce.

That said, recent years have witnessed an increase in research demonstrating the influence of individual auditor characteristics on audit outcomes, including audit quality (see e.g., Cameran et al. 2022; Chou et al. 2021; Gul et al. 2013; Kerckhofs et al. 2023b; Zerni 2012). This observation is interesting because audit firms have incentives to ensure consistency across their engagements and thus have rigorous control mechanisms to reduce the influence of individual auditor characteristics. Existing studies have predominantly focused on publicly observable characteristics such as age, gender, education, intelligence, risk preferences, experience, expertise, and ethics (for overviews, see Hardies et al. 2021; Lennox and Wu 2018), some of which are potentially related to personality traits. However, auditors’ publicly observable demographic variables offer only limited explanatory power (Cameran et al. 2022; Gul et al. 2013), highlighting the need to delve deeper and investigate the role of auditors’ actual personality traits. Understanding how personality influences auditors’ behavior is relevant for enhancing audit quality and the effectiveness of the audit profession.

Responding to calls for more research on auditors’ personalities (DeFond and Zhang 2014; Lennox and Wu 2018), our article provides an overview of the current knowledge of the role of auditors’ personalities. A growing body of research has now examined individual auditors and their characteristics. As there is no singular, all-encompassing theoretical framework to measure personality, we consider research related to the three predominant taxonomies in personality psychology: the Big Five, the HEXACO, and the Dark Triad. These three widely used taxonomies are highly reliable and validated across multiple settings (see e.g., De Vries 2013; Jones and Paulhus 2014; McCrae and Costa 1987). More specifically, the Big Five and the HEXACO models relate to ‘bright’ and the Dark Triad to ‘dark’ personality traits. ‘Bright’ personality traits represent an individual’s socially desirable facets (Barrick and Mount 1991; Ellingson et al. 2001; Judge et al. 2002), whereas ‘dark’ personality traits represent an individual’s socially undesirable facets (Judge and LePine 2007).²

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we provide a brief background on the above-mentioned personality taxonomies. In section 3, we describe the methodology used for identifying and analyzing research. In section 4, we summarize the findings from our literature review on existing research on personality in the audit profession. We conclude with section 5.

Research on personality traits has a rich tradition. For a comprehensive overview of this extensive body of work, we refer to Caprara and Cervone (2000a), Dumont (2010), and McAdams (1997). Roberts (2009, p. 140) consolidated these multifaceted perspectives and comprehensively defined personality traits as “the relatively enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reflect the tendency to respond in certain ways under certain circumstances.” These traits encapsulate the distinctiveness and individual disparities that manifest among individuals (Almlund et al. 2011; Caprara and Cervone 2000b), providing valuable insights into the underlying motives governing human conduct (Christiansen and Tett 2013).

It is noteworthy that personality traits have predictive utility across diverse outcomes, including health, mortality, marital dissolution, relationship quality, occupational achievement, and performance across a spectrum of domains (e.g., Barrick and Mount 1991; McManus and Kelly 1999; Ozer and Benet-Martínez 2006; Roberts et al. 2007). Furthermore, these traits display a relatively high degree of consistency over time (Cobb-Clark and Schurer 2012; Costa and McCrae 1988), reinforcing their significance in studying human behavior and individual differences.

Nevertheless, the study of personality traits does not adhere to a singular, all-encompassing theoretical framework. Consequently, we focus on three widely employed taxonomies for classifying personality traits: the Big Five (also referred to as the ‘five-factor’ model), HEXACO, and the Dark Triad. The Big Five and HEXACO models serve as comprehensive taxonomies for assessing the socially desirable facets of an individual’s personality, with high scores on these traits linking to favorable life outcomes, hence often referred to as ‘bright’ personality traits in the literature (Barrick and Mount 1991; Ellingson et al. 2001; Judge et al. 2002). Conversely, the Dark Triad taxonomy explores and measures ‘dark’ personality traits, encapsulating socially undesirable qualities (Judge and LePine 2007). These three taxonomies present structures that are universally applicable to individuals, and their robustness is evident across diverse temporal periods, data sources, cultural contexts, and situational settings.

Our synthesis aims to obtain a comprehensive overview of existing research, addressing the question: ‘What do we know about auditors’ ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ personality traits and their impact on auditor behavior?’ Therefore, we searched for all research studies that examined the impact of ‘bright’ or ‘dark’ personality traits on the practice of auditing. We searched for such studies through the Web of Science (WoS) and EBSCO databases. Our approach adheres to established guidelines for the systematic literature review process (see e.g., Hardies et al. 2023). Table 3 provides an overview of the eligibility criteria we adapted for our systematic literature review. Overall, we focus on papers using the above-explained personality taxonomies Big Five, HEXACO, or Dark Triad to collect information on personality within the audit profession. We only included papers concerning external auditors. Further, we limited our sample to empirical papers that either have been published or, meet one of the following criteria despite being unpublished: (a) been cited by published papers, (b) coauthored by at least one author who has published about the topic before, or (c) been presented at a top accounting conference (Hardies et al. 2023). We did not restrict our searches to a specific period and focused only on papers written in English. All these eligibility criteria are summarized in Table 3. Table 4 gives an overview of the search terms applied in this study. The search terms included terms like personality traits, the three applied personality taxonomies, and all the personality traits these taxonomies encompass.

The electronic searches took place during November 2023 and resulted in the first author identifying 129 (WoS) and 289 (EBSCO) records, respectively. After removing 64 duplicates, 354 potentially relevant records remained for screening. Subsequently, we first screened the papers’ titles and abstracts to determine their relevance. In this part, 325 papers were excluded for reasons included in our eligibility criteria (see Table 3). Thereafter, we performed a second screening where the selected papers were assessed in-depth (i.e., in full text) against the eligibility criteria. We assessed the risk of bias in individual studies by subjective rules, considering the sample size, study design, methodology, and setting. When required, we addressed disagreements through discussion among the entire author team. In this second screening, we deleted six papers using taxonomies other than the Big Five, HEXACO, or Dark Triad. Furthermore, we were cautious in validating the quality of the papers because we did not restrict inclusion to papers from a specific subset of top-tier journals. As a result, we excluded seven additional papers due to high uncertainty about the reliability of their methods and results. In addition to searching for papers on the mentioned bibliographic databases, we manually searched the initially identified papers for new references, identified additional working papers on SSRN (the Social Science Research Network), and included two working papers recently presented at top accounting conferences.⁵ We refrained from restricting our search exclusively to accounting journals, recognizing that most research on personality is within the domain of psychology. As a result of this approach, we retained a final set of 34 studies. Appendix A provides a comprehensive overview of the selected studies for readers’ reference and consideration. Most papers (65 percent) were survey-based. Additionally, 18 percent were experiments, 15 percent were archival, and a singular study combined archival research with experiments.

In this section, we synthesize research from the 34 studies in our sample on the role of personality in the audit profession. We discuss research on the ‘bright’ personality traits in Section 4.1 and the ‘dark’ personality traits in Section 4.2.

Our systematic literature review provides a comprehensive synthesis of research examining ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ personality traits among auditors. Employing established taxonomies such as the Big Five and HEXACO model for ‘bright’ personality traits and the Dark Triad model for ‘dark’ personality traits, scholars have examined the personality of auditors to gain insights with implications for academic discourse and auditing practice. While research on ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ personality traits among auditors is expanding and becoming increasingly important in the academic auditing literature, evidence also shows that personality only has limited explanatory power in explaining the variance in audit outcomes. This observation is, however, not surprising as it is impossible for numerous independent variables to all have large effects on a single outcome (Tosh et al. 2022). Regarding ‘bright’ personality traits, researchers have uncovered distinct patterns prevalent among auditors, discerning notable associations between personality traits and career preferences within the auditing domain. Noteworthy findings include the propensity of individuals who want to enter the auditing profession to exhibit lower openness to experiences (Kerckhofs et al. 2021), alongside intriguing distinctions in personality traits across hierarchical levels within prominent auditing firms (Pieper 2022). The exploration of ‘bright’ personality traits extends beyond mere descriptive analysis to elucidate their implications for auditing outcomes. Scholars have underscored the role of conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experiences in fostering career satisfaction (Levy et al. 2011), enhancing professional skepticism (Hardies et al. 2024; Li et al. 2023; Sajadi et al. 2022; Samagaio and Felício 2022), and facilitating fraud detection within audit engagements (Emerson 2012).

Conversely, the investigation into ‘dark’ personality traits unveils a shadow on auditors’ personality traits. Researchers have investigated the intricate dynamics underlying these traits, revealing their nuanced influence on auditors’ behaviors and professional outcomes. Notable revelations include the divergence in ‘dark’ personality trait prevalence between auditors affiliated with the Big 4 and those in smaller accounting firms (Kerckhofs et al. 2021; Pieper 2022), and the complex interplay of narcissism among audit partners and its ramifications for audit quality and client relationships (Church et al. 2020; Kerckhofs et al. 2023b; Chou et al. 2021). The implications of ‘dark’ personality traits extend beyond individual behaviors to affect auditing practice. Research shows the association of these dark personality traits with professional skepticism (Hardies et al. 2024; Marçal and Alberton 2020; Safarzadeh and Mohammadian 2023) and fraudulent behavior (Gonzalez and Kopp 2017; Triantoro et al. 2020), underscoring their significance for ethical conduct and regulatory compliance within the auditing profession.

Overall, these findings offer valuable insights for auditing practice. The results suggest that recruiters should seek potential employees scoring high on ‘bright’ personality traits such as conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experiences, but also those scoring high on the ‘dark’ personality trait of narcissism. The existing research suggests that these personality traits lead to preferable outcomes in the audit profession. Notwithstanding, it is important to note that ‘bright’ (‘dark’) personality traits can have a dark (bright) side as well (Judge and LePine 2007). Therefore, we suggest that recruitment and training programs should be aware of the influence of personality on audit outcomes and foster their bright sides while impeding their dark ones.

This systematic literature review has several limitations. First, publication bias (i.e., studies with statistically significant results are more likely to be published than those with null or non-significant findings) may influence the comprehensiveness and representativeness of the reviewed literature, potentially skewing the overall findings and conclusions of the review. However, we tried to avoid this by including high-quality unpublished papers. Second, although we made the inclusion criteria as broad as possible, our review’s scope and inclusion criteria may inadvertently exclude relevant studies, leading to gaps in the coverage of the literature. Nevertheless, we tried to avoid this as much as possible by also using a citation search. Third, assessing the quality of included studies is critical, and multiple authors did this in this paper. However, variations in study quality, methodology, and reporting standards across the included studies may introduce bias or uncertainty in the review findings. Furthermore, the heterogeneity in methods complicates the synthesis and comparison of findings across studies and limits our ability to draw definitive conclusions. Despite increased attention in recent years, research on personality traits in auditing literature remains rather limited.

We conclude this paper by proposing several avenues for future research. First, given the well-known differences in personality traits across cultures (Ion et al. 2017; Jonason et al. 2017), future research can examine how auditors’ personalities differ across cultures and regions and how this eventually affects auditors’ behavior and audit quality. Second, with the continuous advancements in auditing technologies, like artificial intelligence and automation (Han et al. 2023), future studies can examine how auditors with different personality traits adapt to and work with these technologies, determining their effect on audit quality. Third, Smith and Emerson (2017) and Yan and Xie (2016) show that mental well-being factors such as stress, burnout, and resilience are associated with audit quality. Future research could explore how auditors’ personality traits are related to mental well-being. Fourth, audit firms must extend their scrutiny beyond the individual personalities of their employees to encompass the collective composition of personalities within a team. Despite this recognition, the literature on personality in auditing has focused on individuals. A recent study by Takada et al. (2021) is the only exception we know of. Therefore, we propose that future research studies the team-oriented dimension of personality traits within audit settings, exploring how individual personality traits affect collaboration, communication, and decision-making processes within audit teams and assessing the implications for audit quality and team performance. Fifth, as there is no single best measure of audit quality, future research could replicate existing research on personality using different measures of audit quality. Sixth, future research may explore boundary conditions of the effect of personality on auditors’ behavior and audit outcomes. For instance, professionalism in judgment-making seems unaffected by personality traits (Putri and Pratiwi 2021). As such, future research could benefit from studying specific contexts and mechanisms through which personality traits interact with professional conduct in auditing. Next, future research could focus on potential gender differences in auditors’ personality traits and their implications for auditing practice. For instance, Kerckhofs et al. (2023b) found a different effect when investigating the impact of narcissism on audit quality for male and female audit partners. Thus, future research can investigate if certain personality traits are more prevalent or influential among female or male auditors and examine how these differences shape career outcomes and professional interactions within the auditing profession. Finally, future research can examine whether personalized training programs based on auditors’ unique personality traits are beneficial. Such research could offer valuable insights for audit firms seeking to design training methods that enhance auditors’ skills according to their individual attributes.

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article. The authors declare that they have no competing interests.