Trainee Auditors’ Perception of Ethical Climate and Workplace Bullying

workplace bullying, which is closely related to the ethical climate, has always been disruptive and a threat to audit firms. Therefore, the present paper aimed to investigate trainee auditors’ perception of the relationship between the audit firm's ethical climate and workplace bullying.

Data collection tools included The Ethical Climate Questionnaire (Cullen, Victor, and Brason, 1993) and The Workplace Bullying Questionnaire (Arian Gholipour et al, 2009). The questionnaires were distributed among 358 trainee auditors. All the trainee auditors have been working in audit firms for 0 to 4 months. The data were analyzed statistically using SPSS software. The research hypotheses were tested through the structural equation method.

According to the results aspects of ethical climate, such as profit-mindedness, social responsibility, firm’s rules and procedures, and professional rules and principles, can affect significantly bullying behaviors in the workplace. Moreover, our results showed that sex, age, education, audit firm size, and ethnicity do not affect bullying in the audit firms.

Our findings are applicable to both practical and social problems. These findings provide guidelines for audit firms to establish a healthy ethical climate. This, in turn, can result in recruiting, training, and retaining young and skilled professionals in the field of auditing. Also, the findings of the present paper can be applied socially to obviate bullying in the workplace and, consequently, to help in improving auditing both as a profession and as a business.

 The results of the present study, in addition to covering the gap of existing research in this field, provide guidance for audit firms in creating an appropriate ethical environment to reduce bullying of supervisors and thus maintain and promote new audiences in auditing.