Research Of The Effect Of Accouting Firms' Organizational Ethical Climate On Auditors' Moral Disengagement

Moral disengagement refers to a series of individual specific cognitive dispositions,which can rationalize immoral behaviors and prcvent the aelf-condemin process to promote the individual to break away from moral standard and then commit immoral acts.In recent years,the example that CPAs were punished becaused of violation is too numerous to mention individually.and their credit is questioned strongly by the public.However,auditors didn't realize their own moral problems.and when explaining the illegal behavior in auditing,they often tend to cover up their errors or pass the responsibility to others.This phenomenon rcflects that moral disengagement is common in auditors' group,which is easy to make them get out of line,so it is necessary to deeply analyze the cause of auditors' moral disengagement.Existing researches about moral disengagement's causes paid more attention on the relationship between individual factors and moral disengagement.but less on the situation.this research focuses on the black box of the effect of organizational situation on auditors' moral disengagement,with analyzing the relationship between organizational ethical climate of accounting firms and auditors'moral disengagement based on common auditing pressure and individual characters differenees.Questionnaire survey method is the main method in the research and respondents are auditors from Liaoning province.The moral disengagenment of respondents in different pressure situation,the organizational ethical climate of the aeeountingfirms and the level of respondents' organizational commitment were measured with the questionnaires.The regression analysis showed that the orgqanizational ethical climate of accounting company influences the auditors'moral disengagement.The effeet of Corporate Profits and Efficiency is positive and Social Responsibility.Rules&Procedures and Laws&Professional codes is negative.The negative effect of Rules&Procedures is not significant in client pressure situation and the negative effect of Social Responsibility is not significant in time pressure situation.Organizational commitment moderates the relationship between accounting firms' organizational ethical climate and moral disengagement of auditors positively.The higher the level of continuance commitment is,the more significant of the effect of Rules&Procedures on auditors' moral disengagement is.and the higher the level of normative commitment is,the more significant of the effect of Laws&Professional on auditors'moral disengagement is.The moderating effect of continuance commitment disappears in client pressure situation.Based on the conclusion,this research suggests that the accounting firms should melt the moral rules into organizational culture and moral behavior evaluation into rewards and punishment system to promote the development of organizational ethical climate,which could reduce the possibility of auditors' moral disengagement.In addition,perfecting the pressure management system to improve the auditors' ability of resisting the pressure and multiplying the channels of career and creating more learning and training opportunities to improve the level of organizational commitment can help to interven the auditors' moral disengagement.