Big 5 Auditors' Professional and Organizational Identification: Consistency or Conflict?

In response to a variety of challenges, accounting firms are reorganizing and reengineering their core audit services to capitalize on technology advances and to deliver more value‐added services to their clients. Critics, however, have voiced concern that the changes underway undermine auditors' professionalism. Accordingly, this study examines auditors' sense of professional identity. Specifically, we provide (1) a comprehensive model of the relation between auditors' professional and organizational identities, including their potential conflict; and (2) the antecedents and consequences of auditors' professional and organizational identification, including how organizational‐professional conflict relates to turnover. We find relatively high levels of professional identification and organizational identification, and a relatively low level of organizational‐professional conflict among our study's 252 Big 5 auditors. Professional identification is positively related to organizational identification, but it is organizational identification and its antecedents that play the central role in the empirical model. Organizational identification decreases both organizational‐professional conflict and turnover. The results have implications for both practitioners and researchers.