OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Employees often overwork by working longer than contractual or statutory standard working time for no immediate additional monetary gain. Despite the prevalence of overwork in firms, little is understood about why employees choose to work such long hours. Firms often have high overwork levels despite management encouraging employees to make use of work-life balance policies, and employees at such firms often believe that their long work hours are self- imposed. Employees likely would not feel that way if they are given explicit management directives to work long hours, indicating that other factors in the organization lead employees to overwork. I use an experiment to investigate how two key features of a firm’s management control system – the subjectivity in performance evaluation and the strength of employees’ identity with their colleagues (hereafter, group identity) – affect employees’ level of overwork. I find that the effect of subjectivity in performance evaluation on the level of overwork is increasing in group identity strength, such that a positive effect is present only when group identity is stronger and not when it is weaker. I also find that group identity has a significant positive effect on the level of overwork at higher but not lower levels of subjectivity in performance evaluation. These results largely support my hypotheses. Finally, I employ a secondary experiment and provide evidence that subjectivity in performance evaluation impacts the level of overwork primarily through the effort heuristic mechanism. My study is important because understanding factors within firms that propagate overwork is consequential for firms that want to discourage such overwork due to its negative consequences. Understanding these factors also allows firms to have a more complete understanding of what motivates their employees.

We survey 134 accounting professionals to examine whether they experience client-initiated workplace aggression, and if so, what forms that aggression takes and how these professionals respond to or cope with such aggression. We also examine the prevalence of an extreme form of workplace aggression, client-initiated bullying, and its effect on accounting professionals. We examine these phenomena using questionnaires on negative acts, coping mechanisms, and bullying that are grounded in the psychology literature. Ninety percent of respondents have experienced at least one client-initiated negative act in their career; on average, respondents experience four such negative acts. Further, our results show that 34 percent of respondents have experienced client-initiated workplace bullying. To cope with workplace aggression, we found that accounting professionals often try to take action to improve the situation but they also ignore or resign themselves to the situation. Conditional analyses reveal that seniors, managers, and partners typically experience more negative acts than staff but seniors and managers also commonly experience more negative acts than partners; we find few important differences between auditors and tax professionals. Additional analyses suggest that partners generally cope differently than staff, seniors, or managers.

Prior research provides evidence that auditors experience client incivility. We examine whether client incivility negatively influences auditors’ judgments and whether any adverse effects can be mitigated using coping strategies. We first collect descriptive evidence revealing client incivility towards auditors is more widespread than currently documented and victims tend to cope in both active and passive ways. Next, using an experiment we predict and find that audit professionals who experience client incivility are more willing to accept aggressive, client-preferred reporting due to feelings of emotional distress. We also find that coping actively mitigates the negative influence of client incivility whereas coping passively does not. Audit standards and users of financial statements expect auditors to adhere to their professional duty of maintaining a high-level of professional skepticism even when encountering uncivil clients. Our findings suggest that auditors have difficulty adhering to these expectations when they encounter uncivil clients and that only coping actively helps to counteract the harmful effects of client incivility.