Roger Meuwissen

Professor

Roger Meuwissen is Professor of Control and Auditing at Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics. He is also Director of the International Executive Master of Auditing and the Postgraduate Program of Auditing. His research focuses on audit markets, audit regulation, and auditor decision-making, with particular interest in competition and quality in audit services and learning from errors. He has published in leading journals such as Contemporary Accounting Research, European Accounting Review, Journal of International Accounting, Auditing & Taxation, and Strategic Organization. Roger serves on the Executive Committee of the International Symposium on Auditing Research and is a member of the Editorial Board of Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory

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.  
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.
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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