Crisis management during COVID-19 and the attitude towards future technology acceleration in the accounting business

This master thesis entitled “Crisis management during COVID-19 and the attitude towards future technology acceleration in the accounting business” aims to study how the crisis management during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected employees in the accounting business’ view of future technology acceleration. The development of the study is based on the increased digital presence among employees during the pandemic. Preliminary, the thesis presents a relevant theory on the subject before moving forward with a questionnaire survey based on existing theory. The sources of the data gathering were employees in the accounting business. Through this survey, we measured the digital technology level in the accounting business, how they managed the crisis, and their attitude towards future success and future technology acceleration. Our findings reveal that when the employees in the accounting business experienced good management during the crisis, it also increased their attitude towards future technology acceleration. In our study, this link is further mediated by the perception of future success affected by the same experience. An interesting finding was that current technology adoption only moderated the effect of crisis management on future technology acceleration when the current level of technology adoption was high, but a low level did not. We conclude that the quality of the crisis management and the existing technology adoption are strongly linked to the perception of future technology acceleration and market success in the accounting business. This study is limited, but we think this subject is interesting to study further. In our chapter “limitations and future research,” we present several angles to take this further. First, we find it interesting to compare the technology adoption level in the accounting business before COVID-19 to the level during COVID-19 and after to find out if the pandemic, in fact, was an accelerator. Second, we recommend that future research take the client’s perspective into account because accounting is dependent on collaboration with clients. Finally, during the work with this thesis, we found it interesting to see if the willingness to change among the employees in the accounting business has changed based on the sudden forced change the COVID-19 pandemic brought upon them and how different personality traits affect this. Keywords: Accounting business, COVID-19, digitalization, technology adoption, crisis managemen