The Effect of Perceived Quality-Oriented Culture on Auditors’ Willingness to Manage Their Own Errors

Objective
Audit quality is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of the auditing profession’s legitimacy. Its absence would undermine the profession’s credibility and its ability to protect the public interest. Recent research and regulatory frameworks have expanded their focus beyond technical auditing aspects to include the significant influence of organizational culture on auditors’ attitudes and behaviors. A quality-oriented culture is posited to inculcate professional values throughout the firm, thereby reinforcing auditor independence and commitment to the public interest. Concurrently, error management—conceptualized as the willingness of auditors to acknowledge, analyze, communicate, and correct self-made unintentional errors—has emerged as a critical behavioral antecedent that sustains audit quality. In contrast to intentional fraud, such unintentional errors present valuable opportunities for organizational learning when managed effectively. This study examines how auditors’ perceptions of a quality-oriented culture influence their professionalism—operationalized as commitment to the public interest and independence—and how these professional commitments, in turn, shape their willingness to manage their own unintentional errors.
Methods
This study utilized an applied, descriptive-survey research design. The target population comprised practicing auditors from audit firms affiliated with the Iranian Association of Certified Public Accountants. Data were collected in the first half of 2025 via a structured questionnaire, which was divided into four sections. The first section gathered demographic and professional details (e.g., gender, age, education, experience, and job rank). The second section measured the perception of a quality-oriented culture using a 33-item scale by Kritzinger & Barac (2025). The third section evaluated professionalism through two constructs: commitment to the public interest, assessed with a five-item scale from Barrainkua & Espinosa-Pike (2018), and commitment to independence, measured with a four-item scale from Tuan Mansor et al. (2020). The final section gauged auditors' willingness to manage self-made errors using a 13-item scale by Gronewold & Donle (2011), which encompassed dimensions of error analysis, learning, communication, and correction competence. All constructs were measured on a five-point Likert scale. The instrument's content validity was confirmed by expert judgment, and its reliability was verified through Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability indices. Out of 350 distributed questionnaires (using both online and paper-based formats), 206 were returned, resulting in 186 valid and usable responses for analysis. The data were analyzed with SmartPLS 3 software, following a two-step procedure to evaluate the measurement model (for convergent and discriminant validity) and the structural model.
Results
The results indicate that auditors’ perceptions of a quality-oriented organizational culture have a positive and significant effect on their commitment to the public interest and their commitment to independence. Furthermore, organizational culture directly and positively influences auditors’ willingness to manage errors. Both components of professionalism—commitment to the public interest and commitment to independence—were also found to positively affect auditors’ error management. Mediation analysis confirmed that these two constructs play significant mediating roles in the relationship between organizational culture and error management. In other words, a quality-oriented organizational culture not only strengthens professionalism but also indirectly promotes constructive error management through enhanced professional commitment.
Conclusion
The findings indicate that cultural signals from senior leadership—such as tone at the top, reward systems, learning opportunities, and policies prioritizing quality over commercial interests—are instrumental in shaping auditors’ professional values and behaviors. When auditors perceive that their organization champions quality and supports ethical judgment, they are more inclined to view errors as opportunities for learning rather than as career threats, thereby promoting continuous improvement in audit quality. This study contributes to the audit quality literature by integrating organizational culture, professionalism, and error management into a coherent framework. It demonstrates that a quality-oriented culture not only enhances professionalism but also encourages constructive error management, thereby reinforcing overall audit quality. Theoretically, the research advances understanding by delineating the behavioral pathways through which culture influences audit outcomes and by clearly distinguishing error management from fraud-related issues—emphasizing that unintentional errors, when properly managed, can serve as valuable sources of organizational learning. For practice, the results imply that audit firm leaders and regulators should look beyond technical standards to actively foster environments that encourage professionalism and proactive error management. This can be achieved by redesigning performance and reward systems to recognize responsible error disclosure, providing structured consultation and peer review mechanisms, aligning workload and budget pressures with quality objectives, and institutionalizing non-punitive channels for sharing lessons learned from errors. Such measures would help cultivate a culture of transparency and accountability, ultimately restoring and sustaining public trust in the auditing profession.