The influence of budget pressure, deadline pressure and message equivocality on the communication media choice behavior of audit seniors

This study investigates the simultaneous influence of budget pressure, deadline pressure and message equivocality (complexity) on auditors' communication media choices. Prior research on temporal pressure has generally concentrated on budget pressure or a generic time pressure. For some actions, the auditor is faced with choices that can either minimize the amount of time spent on task or the total elapsed time required to complete a task. Media choice is considered to be one type of decision that offers insight into the tradeoffs between the two types of pressure. One factor that affects media choice is the equivocality of an issue. As the issue becomes more equivocal, there is an increased need for dialogue to enable the communication partners to come to a common understanding.;The model presented in this study is new to the literature and suggests that auditors determine the appropriate communication medium based upon their perception of the time on task and the estimated elapsed time to complete a task for each of the media choices available to them. The optimal medium minimizes both the time on task and the elapsed time. Once the auditor determines the estimated time on task and estimated elapsed time of the various media available to use, the media selection is further influenced by the existence of budget and/or deadline pressures and the consequences for exceeding the budget or missing a deadline.;This study is motivated by four issues. First, existing media choice models have not captured variables that are relevant to auditors. The second issue is the lack of differentiation between budget and deadline pressure in existing auditing research. The third issue is the increasing use of and dependence on computer-supported communication media. The final issue that motivates this study is the understanding that different media can also affect the content and influence of the message.;This thesis is based upon a field experiment which varied budget and deadline pressures and message equivocality. Although this study reports few significant results, the information obtained allows a better understanding of the model and facilitates further study of the issues involved.