Fostering Audit Quality through Social Learning from Errors

The findings of this project provide insights into how social learning from errors affects audit quality and how individual, relational, and organizational characteristics shape error learning. Together, these findings point to the following conclusions.

It is not how often an auditor seeks help that improves audit quality; it is how valuable that help is.
The findings show that seeking help frequently is, in itself, linked to lower audit quality. What matters is the learning value auditors derive from the help-seeking interactions they do have. Auditors who have access to a broader network of colleagues and gain more valuable learning from these interactions tend to achieve higher-quality outcomes.

It is not the personality of the auditor that drives learning; it is who the auditor can turn to and the error management climate of the firm.
Personality mainly shapes how many colleagues an auditor turns to, not how often they seek help or how valuable it is. What matters more is who they can turn to. The more accessible and psychologically safe a colleague is, the more auditors turn to them for help. Hierarchy especially drives the value of that help. Auditors learn most from hierarchically superior colleagues. While modest, the climate of the audit firm plays a role too. Help-seeking frequency remains largely the same regardless of whether the climate is open or blame-oriented, but an open error management climate especially improves how much auditors learn from the help they seek.