Ann Vanstraelen

Professor

Ann Vanstraelen is Full Professor of Accounting and Assurance Services at Maastricht University and serves as Head of the department of Accounting and Information Management. She is member of the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences). Membership is for life.Ann Vanstraelen is recognized as one of the leading researchers and key innovators in the fields of auditing and accountancy. Over the past decades, these disciplines have evolved into vibrant international research areas, responding to the growing demand for reliable data and assurance in both the corporate and public sectors. Vanstraelen’s work spans financial reporting and governance issues, as well as the reliability of sustainability reporting, an area in which she has pioneered new research directions. Her contributions have not only advanced academic understanding but also influenced practice, shaping how organizations approach transparency and accountability in an increasingly complex business environment.She coordinates the multidisciplinary research theme “Culture, Ethics and Leadership”. She earned her PhD at the University of Antwerp. Her research interests relate to the broad field of auditing and assurance services, governance, corporate reporting and disclosure, with a specific focus on the quality of accounting and auditing practices.

This practice note explores how virtual and hybrid teamwork affects audit quality, learning, and working conditions. Based on surveys of 624 auditors and interviews across six firms, the study finds that remote work offers strategic advantages such as improved audit efficiency, strong quality orientation, better work-life balance, and enhanced integrity through increased skepticism and ethical behavior. Firms also learned valuable lessons about training and social processes.
However, structural challenges persist: reduced on-the-job learning, weaker social dynamics, difficulties in training new employees, and unchanged budget and deadline pressures. First-year engagements remain particularly vulnerable in virtual settings. Auditors prefer a hybrid model, working from home about 1.6 days per week, indicating that virtual teamwork will remain a key feature of the profession.
Today’s teams often have two formal leaders (i.e., dual leaders), yet research has almost exclusively examined the effects of a single, higher-level team leader’s behaviors on team members and team outcomes. This is problematic because these findings cannot unequivocally be applied to guide the use of dual-leader team structures. Using 93 professional service (i.e., audit) action teams, we examine effects of partner (i.e., external) and manager (i.e., internal) leaders simultaneously exhibiting initiating structure and individualized consideration leadership behaviors on team efficacy and, ultimately, team performance and team viability. Our findings show that the total capacity of leadership effects for a team with two leaders is only captured after considering the influence from both leaders simultaneously, especially when examining interactive effects between an individual leader’s behaviors and across two leaders’ behaviors. We find team efficacy is strengthened when the partner alone exhibits both higher structure and consideration, which is further augmented when the manager also exhibits higher consideration simultaneously. Thus, we find dual-leader interactions demonstrating the “Power of the Partner” and “Power of Consideration” effects are critical for building team efficacy, and in turn, team performance and team viability in dual-leader structures, revealing the existence of meaningful leadership interactions that cannot be found in single-leader studies.  
Important take-away: managers and partners need to be trained in how to effectively demonstrate that they have a genuine commitment to psychological safety and a strong climate for team voice.  
Key Take-Aways What leaders can do to help team members feel safe enough to create a climate of voice in a dual-leader
  1. The manager plays a key role in the team: voice-modeling behavior from the manager has a stronger association than the partner’s behavior. Need for leadership training to help managers demonstrate, through their own “voice” leadership behaviors, that there is an environment of psychological safety that enables voice for the audit team.
  2. Managers’ influence is accentuated when they are more involved and avoid mixed messaging (by not engaging in counterproductive RAQ acts).
  3. Partner’s voice role modeling may help in absence of the manager, but otherwise has a stifling effect (less actual team voice). More manager involvement cannot compensate for this.
The manager is the “team climate engineer” for the audit team.  
KEY TAKE-AWAYS We provide field-based evidence on antecedents to auditors’ skeptical actions, using over 600 auditors across all ranks from six audit firms as participants. We evaluate the relative importance of situational, client, and individual auditor characteristics, along with measures of auditors’ cognitive processing in relation to their self-reports of skeptical actions on one of their own audits. We find that the most important antecedents are each audit firm’s overall professional orientation, auditors’ individual feelings of accountability, their trait skepticism, their motivation to perform well on the engagement, and their intentions to behave skeptically. Auditors’ intentions are most influenced by social norms and less influenced by attitudes towards and self-efficacy about behaving skeptically. Other important antecedents include each audit firm’s quality control systems, certain individual auditors’ personality traits, their client-related industry expertise, and their audit knowledge. Our findings support various aspects of prior conceptual models and suggest ways in which audit firms can promote skeptical actions.  
KEY TAKE-AWAYS Audit firm culture is viewed by regulators and inspectors as the means to enhance audit quality. This study uses the Competing Values Framework (CVF) to explore the culture of large audit firms, and their attempts to change their cultures. We find that these firms predominantly emphasize a culture characterized by collaboration and control, which is consistent with an inward focus. We also find that audit firms struggle to implement a consistent understanding of culture across their offices and function levels, and there is a gap in how partners perceive culture compared to that of non-partner staff. This “culture gap” has negative consequences on auditors, as larger culture gaps are associated with lower psychological safety and poorer person organization fit. Embedding mechanisms can lower the culture gap, but having adequate resources is far more important of an embedding mechanism than “tone at the top.” The findings underscore the importance of actively communicating and reinforcing stated cultural values, and provide audit firms with a practical tool to diagnose problems in achieving culture change.  
The audit committee is an important component of current corporate governance. Despite increasingly strict regulations regarding independence and expertise, it remains unclear why some audit committees underperform and how this affects the effectiveness of the external audit. We argue that, in addition to having the right skills, the audit committee’s engagement in the audit process is crucial for audit effectiveness. Communication, trust, support, power, and leadership are key characteristics that can influence how the audit committee handles disagreements between management and the auditor, and to what extent the committee will critically challenge both parties. These “soft” dimensions have not yet been sufficiently studied. More insight is needed for practitioners, academics, and regulators on how audit committee engagement can be encouraged and how this engagement impacts the audit process. We aim to demonstrate that an active and engaged audit committee can create synergy with the external auditor, where both parties trust and support each other. This synergy can elevate the audit process and audit quality to a higher level.
Het auditcomité is een belangrijk onderdeel van de huidige corporate governance. Ondanks de steeds strenger wordende regelgeving op het gebied van onafhankelijkheid en expertise, is het nog steeds onduidelijk waarom sommige auditcomités onderpresteren en hoe dit de effectiviteit van de externe accountantscontrole beïnvloedt. Wij stellen dat, naast het hebben van de juiste vaardigheden, de betrokkenheid van het auditcomité bij het auditproces cruciaal is voor de effectiviteit van de audit. Communicatie, vertrouwen, ondersteuning, macht en leiderschap zijn belangrijke kenmerken die van invloed kunnen zijn op de manier waarop het auditcomité omgaat met meningsverschillen tussen het management en de accountant, en in hoeverre het auditcomité beide partijen kritisch zal uitdagen. Deze ‘zachte’ dimensies zijn nog onvoldoende onderzocht. Er is meer inzicht nodig voor de praktijk, academici en toezichthouders over hoe de betrokkenheid van het auditcomité kan worden gestimuleerd en hoe de betrokkenheid het auditproces beïnvloedt. Wij willen aantonen dat een actief en betrokken auditcomité in staat is om synergie te creëren met de externe accountant, waarbij beide partijen op elkaar vertrouwen en elkaar steunen. Die synergie kan het auditproces en de auditkwaliteit naar een hoger niveau tillen.
The purpose of this literature review is to provide an overview of the academic literature on the relationship between audit committees (ACs) and audit quality (AQ). The starting point for our review is the most recent comprehensive overview of literature on corporate governance research in accounting and auditing by Carcello et al. (2011a). We start from their findings and conclusions, and add our review of studies on the relationship between ACs and AQ for the most current period, starting with 2011. In doing so, we draw from the IAASB (2014) conceptual framework on AQ that presents the key input, process and output factors that contribute to AQ.
What leaders can do to help team members feel safe enough to create a climate of voice in a dual-leader: The manager plays a key role in the team: voice-modeling behavior from the manager has a stronger association than the partner’s behavior. Need for leadership training to help managers demonstrate, through their own “voice” leadership behaviors, that there is an environment of psychological safety that enables voice for the audit team. Managers’ influence is accentuated when they are more involved and avoid mixed messaging (by not engaging in counterproductive RAQ acts). Partner’s voice role modeling may help in absence of the manager, but otherwise has a stifling effect (less actual team voice). More manager involvement cannot compensate for this.
Auditing standards emphasize that fraud detection is an important objective of an audit and require the exercise of professional skepticism (PS) and a discussion among the engagement team to prevent and detect fraud. The purpose of this study is to examine whether professional skepticism is a driver of fraud brainstorming quality. We investigate the relationship between fraud brainstorming quality, using the measure of Brazel et al. (2010), and auditor’s professional skepticism traits. Using proprietary data from Dutch audit firms on 125 engagements, we find that neutral trait skepticism and professional moral courage of the partner have a significant effect on fraud brainstorming quality. We observe a higher attendance rate and contribution of specialists, more extensive discussion, longer preparation, and longer sessions for engagements led by partners with high neutral trait skepticism and high moral courage. We find no significant results for partners with a high presumptive doubt trait. Additional cross-sectional analyses show that the effect of professional skepticism on FBQ depends on situational, organizational conditions.
AFM’s culture initiative aims to improve audit quality by changing internal cultures of audit firms. This initiative is based on the belief that internal culture influences audit quality and can be measured and changed. But there are important challenges, including the ability to measure culture, the link to audit quality, and the assessment of the costs and benefits of cultural changes. It also is unclear whether clients are willing to pay for increased audit costs resulting from cultural changes. To gain insights about audit firm culture, Francis’ research team interviewed senior leaders of the Big Four audit firms in the Netherlands to provide perspectives on their culture initiatives. These initiatives primarily focus on changing partner behaviors, emphasizing (audit) quality, and using feedback mechanisms. “A common concern among all four firms is that the focus on a zero-error culture comes at the expense of innovation and a neglect of the business side of the audit firms’ practices. A singular focus on a zero-error culture is probably not sustainable, given the commercial and business needs of the firms to be profitable.” The paper also outlines challenges specific to instilling culture in audit firms, such as their decentralized nature and reliance on small partner-led engagement teams. Francis proposes to use a survey based on the widely applied Competing Values Framework to measure perception of audit firm culture and assess the success of culture change initiatives.  
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