Lena Pieper

Assistant Professor

Lena Pieper is an Assistant Professor of Accountancy at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She earned her Ph.D. in Accountancy from Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics, where her research focused on auditing, leadership, and team dynamics. Lena previously spent time at Gies as a visiting Ph.D. scholar in 2022 before joining the faculty.Her research examines the human side of auditing, exploring how personality traits and leadership behaviors of audit partners and managers influence team functioning and audit quality. Drawing on psychology and organizational behavior theories, Lena’s work provides insights into improving audit processes through better understanding of team dynamics. She has collaborated with major audit firms and contributed to FAR projects investigating auditor performance and leadership.Lena’s publications and presentations address topics such as audit firm culture, partner-manager dyads, and the impact of personality on job performance. She is passionate about bridging academic research and practice to enhance audit quality and professional development in the accounting field.

Leadership behaviors by partners and managers, and audit team performance

Leadership research in the organizational behavior (OB) literature has generally focused on single-leader teams. Yet many organization, including audit firms, have more complex dual leader structures in which leadership duties are shared between two team leaders. We study this in the context of audit teams in which the dual leaders are the audit partner and the audit manager. We find some evidence that division of labor in leadership behaviors is effective. However, the most effective audit teams are those in which both the partner and manager have what are called “consideration” behaviors that exhibit a concern for the welfare of team members. We call this “the power of consideration.” This finding makes sense given that audit teams come together for short periods of time, and there is a need for the audit team to feel confident in order to be effective. The other condition in which audit teams perform well is when the partner exhibits strong leadership behaviors for both initiating structure (defining goals, communication channels, time-lines) and consideration, irrespective of the manager’s leadership behaviors. We call this the “super partner” effect. Overall, the results point to active engagement by partners and managers with the audit team as being the most effective leadership behaviors. While initiating structure behaviors are important, consideration behaviors are far more important in audit teams, a finding which differs from prior OB research. Finally, the results underscore the importance of training partners and managers in the effective use of consideration behaviors to build team confidence and to ensure the best audit team performance.

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Understanding Audit Firm Culture through the Lens of the Competing Values Framework

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.

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