The Association Between Audit Office Team Diversity and Audit Quality

Overview

Surveys and field studies find that diverse teams are high-performing teams. Diverse teams value different perspectives and encourage the participation of team members through psychological safety, leading to higher team performance. Team diversity is an office-level characteristic, that is distinguishable from other characteristics studied in prior auditing literature, that has an incremental effect on audit quality. The positive association between team diversity and audit quality is robust to controlling other audit office and client characteristics. This positive association is even stronger for more complex and non-routine audit engagements.

Objectives

• Develop strategies to foster psychological safety within diverse audit teams to enhance overall team performance and audit quality. • Formulate an audit office-level plan that integrates team diversity as a distinct characteristic to improve audit quality, especially in complex and non-routine engagements.