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Machiavellianism, Moral Orientation, Social Desirability Response Bias, and Anti-intellectualism: A Profile of Canadian Accountants

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Abstract

Prior research has demonstrated that accountants differ from the general population on many personality traits. Understanding accountants’ personality traits is important when these characteristics may impact professional behavior or ability to work with members of the business community. Our study investigates the relationship between Machiavellianism, ethical orientation (idealism, relativism), anti-intellectualism, and social desirability response bias in Canadian accountants. We find that Canadian accountants score much higher on the Machiavellianism scale than U.S. accountants. Additionally, our results show a significant relationship between Machiavellianism and relativism, idealism, anti-intellectualism, and social desirability response bias. Our results indicate that professional Canadian accountants may not share the same personality characteristics as U.S. accountants. We extend previous research investigating Canadian accountants, by explicitly recognizing the impact of social desirability response bias, and by including anti-intellectualism.

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Notes

  1. As of October 1, 2014 the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) the Society of Management Accountants of Canada (CMA Canada) and the Certified General Accountants of Canada (CGA-Canada) merged into one unified organization—Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada. This organization brings together 190,000 accountants in Canada (Chartered Professional Accountants Canada 2015a).

  2. Corporate ethics/social responsibility included two views: stakeholder view and stock holder view. High Machs were less likely to support the stakeholder view than low Machs. For more details, see (Shafer and Simmons 2008).

  3. The AI measure is an inverse scale; such that, a low AI score indicates a higher level of intellectualism and a high AI score indicates a lower level of intellectualism.

  4. In Canada, “college” refers to a two-year post-secondary institution, while four-year institutions are universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Accounting, The University of Rhode Island, 7 Lippett Road, Kingston, Rhode Island, 02881, USA

    Anis Triki

  2. Department of Accounting, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Avenue, St. Catharines, ON, L2S 3A1, Canada

    Gail Lynn Cook & Darlene Bay

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  1. Anis Triki
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Correspondence to Gail Lynn Cook.

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Triki, A., Cook, G.L. & Bay, D. Machiavellianism, Moral Orientation, Social Desirability Response Bias, and Anti-intellectualism: A Profile of Canadian Accountants. J Bus Ethics 144, 623–635 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2826-7

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