Organisational and professional commitment of early career accountants: do mentoring and organisational ethical climate matter?

Abstract

This study assesses the effects of mentoring and organisational ethical climate (OEC) on the organisational and professional commitment (PC) of early career accountants (ECAs) (i.e. accounting graduate recruits with three or less years of working experience). The empirical data are based on a questionnaire survey from 86 ECAs in Australian public accounting firms, and hypothesis testing utilises partial least squares analysis. Our results indicate when a career development style of mentoring is adopted there is greater organisational as well as PC. By contrast, a social support mentoring style has no significant impact on organisational commitment (OC) and a negative effect on PC. Further, our data also reveal OEC to be positively associated with OC, and OC in turn having a positive impact on PC. The results imply that fostering a career-focused mentoring environment and an OEC can increase an ECA's OC and PC. These results have various implications for human resource management at both the accounting firm and professional levels.

Factors Related to Organizational Commitment of Jordanian Auditors: A Structural Model

“…The instrument employs seven-point Likert-type scale (from "1" for strongly disagree to "7" for strongly agree), whereby the scale of 7 denotes organizational commitment of high level. The reliability and validity of for Mowday et al (1979), nine-item instrument have been reported by past works (Baack et al, 1993;Donnelly et al, 2003;Kwon and Banks, 2004;McManus and Subramaniam, 2014;Sommer et al, 1996;Steers, 1977). Appositely, the Cronbach alpha for this instrument was 0.864 in this study.…”

Mediating Role of Affective Commitment in The Effect of Ethical Work Climate on Felt Obligation Among Public Officers

“…Findings also show that in every relationship among variables are consistent with previous research. As stated earlier, ethical work climate (McManus & Subramaniam, 2014;Tsai & Huang, 2008;Schwepker Jr., 2001) and perceived organizational support (Lew, 2009;Yew, 2011) are important antecedents of affective commitment. But the main point is that finding also shows that for affective commitment in social exchange perspective, perceived organizational support is the most important predictor to building commitment (Eisenberger, Fasolo, & Davis-LaMastro, 1990).…”

Antecedents of organisational professional conflict faced by professional accountants in different work settings

“…The participants had to indicate how much they agreed or disagreed with three statements (see Appendix) on a Likert scale, ranging from 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (completely agree). This reduced version of the scale of professional commitment has been used in previous studies, such as the one by McManus and Subramaniam (2014).…”

“…One of the main reasons for the interest in studying OPC lies in the negative outcomes of this phenomenon. Most studies have found that OPC is associated with dysfunctional consequences, such as a reduction in job satisfaction, an increase in professional as well as organisational turnover intentions (Bamber & Iyer, 2002;Hall, Smith, & Langfield-Smith, 2005;Shafer, Lowe, & Fogarty, 2002), and damage to the quality of job performance (McManus & Subramaniam, 2014).…”