Designing Auditor's Professional Maturity Model by Grounded Theory Approach

Abstract

The structure of every profession for employees is like a birth-to-death cycle, which results in a higher quality of job responsibilities and services, depending on individual job careers. An auditor's professional maturity has been ignored among all structural and imperative characteristics because many of ideologists in the profession have focused more on the formulation of rules and regulations than the profession employees’ soul. The purpose of this research is designing auditor's professional maturity model by grounded theory approach. The methodology of this research is a development, exploratory and qualitative research in terms of result, objective and method, respectively. The statistical population consists of 14 accountants selected through theoretical sampling. The criteria for selecting interviewees is professional audit experience in terms of university education, financial statements review, and acquaintance with qualitative researches and the interviewing process. Then, data is collected through grounded data analysis (foundation data analysis) and interviews. Finally, the research model is designed based on the theoretical framework. The research results represent an element of underlying causes of professional maturity of auditors. According to results, professional maturity as a integrate process based on cognitive features including 3 types of psychological maturity, perceptual maturity and skillful maturity, multidimensional features including 2 types of structural maturity and occupational position and, ultimately, the promising feature of cultural maturity and social maturity, can help auditors to act more effectively in the professional path. ‌

Keywords

• contextual factors
• auditor's professional maturity
• grounded theory approach