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This study investigates whether or not accounting and legal decision-makers at publicly traded US firms exhibit a professional affiliation bias with respect to their selection of business service providers. Executives at NYSE or NASDAQ firms who were affiliated with the accounting profession, the legal profession, or neither profession indicated their likelihood of using one of three randomly assigned types of firms (i.e., a CPA firm, a law firm, or a firm with both CPA and attorney partners) to provide five selected business services. The five business services represent the range of accounting and legal services that firms often outsource: audit, tax representation, mergers and acquisitions, trade regulation/interstate commerce, and litigation. We find that executive level decision-makers at publicly traded US firms do exhibit a professional affiliation bias in the selection of business service providers and that this professional affiliation bias is stronger in attorneys than in CPAs. The fact that all respondents were NYSE or NASDAQ executives, rather than students or another surrogate population, provides additional relevance and generalizability to our findings. Identifying this bias can help executives avoid suboptimal initial selection decisions and/or inaccurate performance evaluations of external business service providers.

Aligning the project management methodology (PMM) to a particular project is considered to be essential for project success. Many outsourced software projects fail to deliver on time, budget or do not give value to the client due to inappropriate choice of a PMM. Despite the increasing range of available choices, project managers frequently fail to seriously consider their alternatives. They tend to narrowly tailor project categorization systems and categorization criterion is often not logically linked with project objectives. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a contingency fit model comparing the differences between critical success factors (CSFs) for outsourced software development projects in the current context of traditional plan-based and agile methodologies.

A theoretical model and 54 hypotheses were developed from a literature review. An online Qualtrics survey was used to collect data to test the proposed model. The survey was administered to a large sample of senior software project managers and practitioners who were involved in international outsourced software development projects across the globe with 984 valid responses.

Results indicate that various CSFs differ significantly across agile and traditional plan-based methodologies, and in different ways for various project success measures.

This study is cross-sectional in nature and data for all variables were obtained from the same sources, meaning that common method bias remains a potential threat. Further refinement of the instrument using different sources of data for variables and future replication using longitudinal approach is highly recommended.

Practical implications of these results suggest project managers should tailor PMMs according to various organizational, team, customer and project factors to reduce project failure rates.

Unlike previous studies this paper develops and empirically validates a contingency fit model comparing the differences between CSFs for outsourced software development projects in the context of PMMs.

The current study examines public accountants' professionalism and professional commitment (PC) and their effect on job performance. Results provide support for four of five dimensions of Hall's (1968) professionalism framework (beliefs in professional affiliation, professional dedication, self-regulation, and social obligation) and Meyer et al.'s (1993) three-dimensional PC framework (affective, continuance, and normative professional commitment) for modeling public accountants. Support was also found for most of the hypothesized relationships between professionalism and PC. Beliefs in professional affiliation, professional dedication, and self-regulation positively influenced affective professional commitment (APC). Belief in professional affiliation was negatively influenced by continuance professional commitment (CPC) but positively influenced by normative professional commitment (NPC). Belief in social obligation was also positively influenced by NPC. As expected, professionalism and PC were associated with job performance. Professionalism had an incremental effect beyond PC on job performance and as well, PC had an incremental effect over professionalism on job performance. Identifying relationships between professionalism and professional commitment with desirable outcomes is important for justifying future investments in the public accounting profession. Understanding these issues will assist in determining the types of professional attributes and commitments that are and should be fostered by the accounting profession.

This study aims to examine the extent to which clients’ perceptions of a financial auditor’s communication style affect their psychological comfort and trust when considering whether to retain the incumbent firm for future financial audits.

A multistage method was used comprising integrated results from a literature review and findings from five in-depth interviews with chief financial officers of listed firms. A cross-sectional survey then yielded valid responses from 190 incorporated firms listed on The Stock Exchange of Thailand or Market for Alternative Investment.

The results reveal that, consistent with social interaction theory, an affiliation communication style positively influenced client’s psychological comfort and trust in an auditor. On the other hand, a dominant communications style negatively impacted psychological comfort. Cognitive social capital was found to moderate the links between dominant communication–psychological comfort, psychological comfort–trust and trust–relationship commitment.

From a managerial perspective, an affiliation communication style is fundamental for building client comfort and trust, especially for professional service firms, but especially in Eastern collectivist cultures that are relationship rich, where people seek to avoid conflict and prefer indirect communication styles over more direct styles.

This research highlights the central role that interpersonal communication style plays in developing psychological comfort and trust with a professional service firm. In addition, this study introduces the role of client psychological comfort as a key mediator between communications and trust.

This chapter presents the findings from an exploratory mixed-methods study that examined the significance of social location(s) and intersectionality in shaping the opportunities and experiences of an international sample of individuals engaging in education consulting work. Educational consulting is a growing field, attracting entrepreneurial professionals from practitioner and academic communities around the world (Gunter & Mills, 2017); however, very little research exists on this diverse and diffused group of workers. The research sought to answer two questions: (a) What is the influence of social identity and social position(s) on education consulting opportunities and experiences? (b) What benefits and challenges do educational development consultants experience in their work? Insights from feminist intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) and theories concerning implicit bias (Williams, 2014) guide the analysis and discussion. The central argument made, based on the findings from the online survey and interviews with consultants, is that identity and social positioning are significant factors shaping who secures contracts and the nature and value of such experiences for individuals’ personal and professional development, as well as their professional contributions and impact overall. The findings clearly suggest that identity and social position are believed to be influential as enabling and constraining factors on education consultants work experiences. While geographic location emerged as pivotal in shaping who had access to consulting opportunities, intersections with socioeconomic status, class, ethnicity, and age were thought by participants to either further marginalize them or enhance their consulting opportunities and experiences.

Corporate scandals involving senior executives plague many businesses. Although customers and noncustomers may be exposed to news of the same scandal, they may appraise dimensions of the transgression differently, thereby affecting post-scandal patronage intentions. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how consumer-firm affiliation affects future patronage intentions by examining nuances in customers’ vs noncustomers’ reactions toward the transgressor’s professional performance and immoral behavior.

Four between-subjects experimental studies were used to test whether performance-relevant and/or immorality-relevant pathways drive customers’ vs noncustomers’ post-scandal patronage intentions. The results were analyzed using analysis of variance, parallel mediation and serial mediation.

The results demonstrate that performance judgment, and not immorality judgment, drive the relationship between consumer-firm affiliation and post-scandal patronage intentions (Study 1a), regardless of the order of information presented (Study 1b). Customers form more positive performance judgments because they give more weight to performance-related information (Study 2), demonstrating a sequential effect of consumer-firm affiliation on post-scandal patronage intentions only through the performance-relevant, and not immorality-relevant, pathway (Study 3).

This research contributes to the literature on social distance and moral judgments. Future research should examine other deleterious outcomes such as brand sabotage and negative word-of-mouth, as well as potential moderators including repeated transgressions and prevalence of the infraction in other firms.

This research offers important nuances for understanding how performance and immorality judgments differentially operate and affect post-scandal patronage intentions. The findings highlight the strategic value of communicating the leader’s performance (e.g. professional contributions) as a buffer against potential declining patronage.

Offering new insights into the extant literature and lay beliefs which contend that harsh moral judgment reduces patronage intentions, this research uncovers why and how exposure to the same scandal can result in varying moral judgments that subsequently influence patronage intentions. Importantly, this research shows that the performance-relevant pathway can explain why customers have higher post-scandal patronage intentions compared to noncustomers.

In view of the increasingly dynamic ethnic composition of nation states in Europe and elsewhere, this paper aims to examine the effects of ethnic affiliation on ethnocentrism and domestic purchase bias, and to test a model of consumer ethnocentrism antecedents and outcomes in a multi‐ethnic transitional economy.

Empirical data were collected via personal interviews from 580 urban consumers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was, in the aftermath of violent ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, divided into two major sub‐regions inhabited by three clearly identifiable ethnic groups. A structural model with five first‐order reflective constructs was evaluated to test the hypothesized relationships.

The findings confirm that both national identity and nationalism are significant predictors of consumer ethnocentrism, and that ethnic affiliation has a direct effect on both consumer ethnocentrism and on domestic purchase bias. However, the antecedent nature of cultural openness in relation to consumer ethnocentrism was not confirmed.

While it has been suggested previously that, when consumers have dual allegiances, the construct of national identity may be of a lesser explanatory power, the results attest to the value of both nation‐state level constructs in the model as reliable predictors of consumer ethnocentrism. The findings also suggest that a differentiated marketing strategy may be warranted on entering multi‐ethnic markets.

Unlike most prior studies that tested ethnocentrism models across different countries with citizens of each country being addressed as a culturally/ethnically uniform group, this study does not limit in‐groups to a nation state, but examines groups based on ethnic affiliation.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a financial fraud practice, known as affinity fraud, relies on building trust with victims based on shared affiliations or characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity or professional designations, for the purpose of exploiting the trust factor for financial advantage.

Sources of information consisted of scholarly articles and articles retrieved from the web.

Findings suggest that these fraud offenders rely on a myriad of persuasion techniques to overcome offender skepticism coupled with victims engaging in a psychological concept known as projection bias to evaluate the credibility of these offenders. These factors create a negative synergy that dilutes the perceived need for due diligence normally required prior to engaging in securities transactions. In addition, these offenders display a predatory quality, debunking the myth that fraud offenders exhibit a homogenous crime group behavioral profile.

Social institutions that include both for profit and not for profit should consider evaluating their interactions with those who share similar characteristics and affiliations that attempt to offer goods or services by considering some of the factors contained within this article that may dilute due diligence protocol.

This paper serves to alert and educate anti‐fraud professionals, law enforcement and policy makers of a predatory fraud practice that targets organizations exploiting the inherent trust that these organizations rely upon.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a financial fraud practice, known as affinity fraud, relies on building trust with victims based on shared affiliations or characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity or professional designations, for the purpose of exploiting the trust factor for financial advantage.

Sources of information consisted of scholarly articles and articles retrieved from the web.

Findings suggest that these fraud offenders rely on myriad persuasion techniques to overcome offender skepticism coupled with victims engaging in a psychological concept known as projection bias to evaluate the credibility of these offenders. These factors create a negative synergy that dilutes the perceived need for due diligence normally required prior to engaging in securities transactions. In addition, these offenders display a predatory quality. debunking the myth that fraud offenders exhibit a homogenous crime group behavioral profile.

Social institutions that include both for profit and not for profit should consider evaluating their interactions with those who share similar characteristics and affiliations that attempt to offer goods or services by considering some of the factors contained within this paper that may dilute due diligence protocol.

This paper serves to alert and educate anti‐fraud professionals, law enforcement and policy makers of a predatory fraud practice that targets organizations exploiting the inherent trust upon which these organizations rely.