KEY TAKE-AWAYS Imitation of senior auditors might be a valuable strategy for juniors to learn on-the-job and improve their performance. In this paper, the research team experimentally examines how a senior auditor’s working style (high diligence vs. low diligence) interacts with the nature of the audit firm’s promotion system (superior-based vs. consensus-based) to influence junior auditor judgment by affecting junior auditors’ imitation behavior.  

In hierarchically structured audit teams, it is common that junior auditors gather a large part of the evidence used as the basis for the audit opinion, which makes information sharing critical. However, if a team consensus already exists, individual auditors may conform to the team and thus hesitate to raise important issues they themselves acquired about a client. This study experimentally investigates how the origin of team consensus (i.e. consensus coming from junior members vs. consensus coming from senior members) and the type of the inclusive climate (i.e. authenticity vs. belongingness) impact junior auditors’ conformity behavior and their willingness to share their own risk assessment with their team. Drawing on conformity theory, we hypothesize and find that junior auditors are more likely to conform to a team consensus of senior members, and are also less likely to share their risk assessment with the team, particularly within an authenticity climate. These effects of conforming more to senior members, however, are mitigated when firms focus on a climate of belongingness.