Dr. Therese Grohnert

Associate Professor

Therese Grohnert is Associate Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, and programme leader for the MSc in Learning and Development in Organisations. Her research focuses on workplace learning, judgment and decision-making, and creating supportive learning cultures in professional service firms. She applies insights from learning psychology and decision-making research to improve audit quality and professional performance. Therese has published in journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society and Journal of Business Ethics, and collaborates closely with practice through field-based research and consultancy. She is also active in educational innovation, problem-based learning, and faculty development.

A Meta-Analytic Literature Review on Organization-Level Drivers of Team Learning
Organizations wishing to foster learning at the team level can do so effectively through providing teams with resources such as autonomy and enrichment, next to general support of money and time. These resources should be provided in a supportive, learning-driven culture shaped by engaged, supportive leaders that are connected with their teams to create the best possible conditions for teams to engage in continuous learning, either directly or, even more effectively, by enabling teams to develop psychological safety, shared cognition, potency/efficacy, as well as social and task cohesion. Creating this system of conditions for effective team learning requires close alignment of different functions within an organization, bringing leadership and HR together to achieve a shared goal.  
Read PDF
More Info
Moving Audit Teams Forward: Designing firm environments for sustainable learning from errors
Over the past ten years, oversight bodies, regulators, governments, and clients have been demanding audit firms deliver higher audit quality, closing the expectations gap. As a response, audit firms have been working on developing and implementing new procedures, structures and audit programs. However, this ‘hard’ approach has not yielded the desired improvements.  
Read PDF
More Info
Retaining the learning professional: A survival study on workplace learning in professional service firms
Lowering professional turnover is of paramount importance for professional service firms, as with each professional, crucial proprietary knowledge leaves the firm. Based on the need to retain this crucial knowledge in the firm, this study explores whether factors that drive learning at work also mitigate professionals’ turnover behavior. Building on insights from both workplace learning and turnover research, this study follows 96 professional auditors across a period of 5 years to determine how drivers for workplace learning at the organizational, the social interaction, and the individual level relate to turnover behavior.
Read PDF
More Info
A Meta-Analytic Literature Review on Organization-Level Drivers of Team Learning
Organizations have a marked interest in fostering team learning to manage performance and innovation. However, practitioners and researchers currently lack coherent knowledge on which drivers are effective at fostering team learning. Along with team learning, we also focus on the emergent states of psychological safety, shared cognition, team potency/efficacy, and cohesion, previously related to team learning. In this meta analysis, we include 50 quantitative studies providing information on 4,778 teams of professionals across manufacturing, product development, academic research and teaching, health care, and professional services. First, we find that team learning correlates positively, if moderately, with four organization-level drivers: top-level leadership, organizational culture, job resources, and organizational infrastructure. Second, two of these drivers also correlate robustly with team emergent states: organizational culture and job resources. These findings provide specific levers and estimates of relative influence to guide managerial practice and future research on team learning.
Read PDF
More Info
Team learning behaviors in virtual engagement teams
When teams are the prime unit of working and learning in organizations – such as is the case in accountancy firms – they face many challenges to use their potential and achieve their goals. Their business environment can be characterized by complexity and ambiguity. This requires teams to engage in team learning behaviors that allow team members to share their skills, knowledge, information, and point of view to modify team’s habits and work procedures depending on what is required. Understanding how team learning behaviors affect virtual engagement teams is the central research question in the FAR project “Virtual Audit Teamwork: working, learning, and delivering high audit quality virtually.” The purpose of this literature review is twofold: On the one hand, the research team aims to provide an overview of available insights on remote work and virtual teamwork in the auditing profession. On the other hand, the team strive to provide an overview of available literature on team learning behaviors in virtual teams to identify drivers and facilitate conditions of team learning in virtual teams. A systematic review of how team learning behaviors are affected by virtual teamwork is still missing, and we know little about how these insights relate to the auditing profession.  
Read PDF
More Info
Virtual audit teamwork: Working, learning, and delivering high audit quality virtually
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.
Read PDF
More Info
The first decade of the FAR: past, present and future
This commemorative booklet marks the tenth anniversary of the Foundation for Auditing Research (FAR). It reflects on FAR’s journey as a unique platform where academic research and audit practice meet to advance audit quality. The publication highlights:
  • FAR’s Mission and Impact: How FAR evolved from an ambition into a reality, fostering collaboration between researchers and practitioners through access to real-world audit data.
  • Insights from Leadership: An interview with founding academic director Jan Bouwens and his successor Anna Gold on FAR’s achievements, challenges, and future priorities.
  • Research Highlights: Four featured studies on topics such as auditors’ commercial efforts, student expectations versus auditor experiences, data analytics and professional skepticism, and learning within audit teams.
  • Key Figures and Projects: An overview of FAR’s outputs, including practice notes, masterclasses, conferences, and a growing portfolio of research projects.
The booklet not only looks back with pride but also outlines ambitions for the future of strengthening knowledge transfer, increasing practical usability of research, and deepening engagement across audit firms and academia.
Read PDF
More Info
Tien jaar Foundation for Auditing Research verleden, heden en toekomst
De Foundation for Auditing Research (FAR) viert haar tienjarig jubileum. Ter gelegenheid van deze bijzondere mijlpaal presenteren wij met trots deze jubileumpublicatie. In het afgelopen decennium is FAR uitgegroeid tot een uniek platform waar gedegen academisch onderzoek en de accountantspraktijk op een constructieve en waardevolle manier samenkomen. Wat FAR bijzonder maakt, is niet alleen de toegang tot rijke, praktijkgerichte auditdata, maar vooral de voortdurende dialoog tussen onderzoekers en accountants. Dit boekje laat zien hoe FAR deze samenwerking tot leven brengt. Het bevat een interview met de vertrek­kende academic director Jan Bouwens en zijn opvolger Anna Gold. Hun reflecties bieden zowel een persoon­lijke als institutionele kijk op de ontwikkeling van FAR in de afgelopen tien jaar en de koers die voor de toekomst is uitgezet. Het interview laat zien hoe FAR’s missie, het dichter bij elkaar brengen van wetenschap en praktijk, is uitgegroeid van een ambitie tot een alledaagse realiteit, en benadrukt tegelijkertijd waar nog verdere stappen gezet kunnen, en moeten, worden. Om de gemeenschappelijke basis tussen wetenschap en praktijk te illustreren, bevat dit boekje daarnaast vier projectbeschrijvingen. Elke beschrijving belicht kort een FAR-ge­relateerde studie, gevolgd door het perspectief van een onderzoeker en een reflectie van een praktijkprofes­sional. Deze bijdragen onderstrepen dat FAR-onderzoek een vorm van co-creatie is: niet over de praktijk, maar samen met de praktijk.
Read PDF
More Info
3rd FAR International Conference Proceedings

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.

Read PDF
More Info
No related news.

Filter projects: 

Project Lead
Theme Filter
University Filter
1 - 10 of 51 projects