Professional Commitment, Organizational Commitment, and Organizational-Professional Conflict in the Internal Audit Function Model: Development and Test

This dissertation is a descriptive, exploratory examination of professional commitment, organizational commitment, and conflict between those commitments in the internal audit profession. That conflict has been suggested in prior studies as the source of dysfunctional outcomes such as increased role stress, high turnover, decreased job satisfaction, and the exercise of improper judgment leading to audit failures. The descriptive aspect of this study deals with the development of a more comprehensive structural model of the factors and relationships involved in commitment and conflict than has been developed by previous research dealing with accountants. The exploratory aspect deals with the testing and refinement of the developed model utilizing the internal audit profession as the field of examination. The model developed in this study is derived from the synthesis of factors suggested by role theory, the concept of side bets, the cosmopolitan-local construct, and the concept of commitment as a process. This research utilizes a questionnaire administered to 205 practicing internal auditors in order to test 30 hypothesized relationships. Path analysis is used to determine the significant direct relationships between variables with a process of theory trimming being conducted in order to produce more parsimonious structural models. Indirect relationships between significant variables are identified and their redundant or suppressive nature determined. Explanations of these suppressive or redundant relationships are provided based on the theoretical considerations identified above. Such a determination and explanation of the redundant and suppressive indirect relationships involved in the commitment-conflict relationship has not been accomplished in earlier studies of the subject. Although the procedures used here do not support causal conclusions, the findings of this study indirectly provide evidence that conflict between the two commitments in the internal audit area is not to be considered inherent. The findings also suggest a possible undesirable relationship between organizational formalization and professional commitment