Iver Wiertz

Researcher

Iver Wiertz is a Ph.D. graduate from Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics, specializing in Accounting and Information Management. His research focuses on teamwork in the audit profession, particularly the dynamics of information sharing, virtual collaboration, and hierarchical structures. His dissertation, Teamwork Transformed: Exploring Information Sharing, Team Virtuality, and Hierarchy in the Audit Profession, provides insights into how audit teams can enhance performance and maintain audit quality in increasingly virtual work environments. Iver has published on topics such as team adaptability, empowering leadership, and organizational learning culture, and his work offers practical recommendations for improving collaboration in audit teams.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS We find that virtual teamwork offers the auditing profession strategic advantages and valuable lessons, but it also presents structural challenges. Virtual teamwork is therefore not exclusively good or bad, but it offers a firm a trade-off between advantages and disadvantages.  
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.  
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.
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