How Accounting Professionals Cope with Client-Initiated Workplace Aggression

• In Event: Auditor-Client Interactions

Abstract

We survey 163 accounting professionals to examine the mechanisms they use to cope with workplace aggression initiated against them by their clients. Using data from our questionnaires, we briefly touch on the negative acts that accountants experience at the hands of their clients but focus on their coping responses and their perceptions of how the negative acts affect their work. Our results show that accounting professionals often try to take action to address the situation, but they also commonly passively cope by ignoring or resigning themselves to the situation. Further, how they cope depends on their rank in their firm and is related to how much they believe their work is adversely affected by client-initiated workplace aggression. That is, partners generally cope differently than staff, seniors, or managers and certain coping mechanisms appear better-suited to avoid adverse effects of client-initiated aggression (e.g., talking to the perpetrator) than others (e.g., just accepting the situation).

Authors

• Tim David Bauer, University of Waterloo

• Sean Hillison, Virginia Tech

• Ala Ahmed Mokhtar, University of Waterloo