| The profession of public accounting is considered to be highly stressful in terms of workload and role stressors. Despite its widespread acceptance and application in the psychology literature, job exhaustion, a specific type of stress common to the workplace, has only recently appeared in the research literature relative to public accounting. These recent studies highlighted the problem of exhaustion within the profession and examined its causes relative to the environment of public accounting. Another factor, not previously addressed in the context of public accounting, is the role personality plays in affecting job exhaustion and interacting with environmental stressors in predicting exhaustion.; The main purpose of the current study is to examine how key personality traits in public accountants impact job exhaustion and moderate the relationship between workload and exhaustion. Specifically, the personality traits of neuroticism, hardiness, self-efficacy, locus of control, and Type-A behavior have been shown in non-accounting studies to individually affect job exhaustion.; Ninety-one public accountants from a regional firm and one office of a Big-Five firm participated in the study. Subjects completed and returned a questionnaire, which included both scale and demographic items. Included in the survey were scales for the role stressors of role overload, role conflict, and role ambiguity. Job exhaustion was regressed on the personality variables, role stressors, workload, and interactions to test hypotheses relating to personality's effects on job exhaustion of public accountants.; Initial correlation results indicate that many personality variables are significantly, individually related to job exhaustion, similar to prior research in non-accounting studies. However, results of the hypotheses' tests, which involve testing the whole model, indicate that only hardiness, self-efficacy, and the interaction of self-efficacy and workload are significant variables relative to personality in predicting job exhaustion in public accountants. Further analyses suggest that the personality trait of hardiness is especially salient to public accountants in impacting job exhaustion: hardiness proved to be the most significant predictor of exhaustion in the model, even in the presence of role stressor variables. |
