Audit Commercialization and Auditors' Subjective Wellbeing: An Analysis of the Iranian Audit Environment

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of commercialization of audit on the Subjective well-being of auditors in auditing firms of the Iranian Association of Certified Public Accountants.

This research is applied research in terms of purpose and is descriptive-survey research in terms of method. For measuring commercialization (market- customer and process-oriented) we used the summarized questionnaire of Broberg et al. (2018) and for measuring Subjective well-being including the component of mental happiness from Lyubomirsky and Lepper questionnaire (1999), job satisfaction from Wright and Bonett questionnaire (2007) and the psychological environment of the work of Mattila et al. Data were collected from 392 questionnaires completed by auditors working in auditing firms in 2020 and structural equation method and PLS software were used to analyze the data.

The results show that all components of commercialization (market-oriented, customer- oriented and process-oriented) of audit firms have a significant and positive effect on the subjective well-being of auditors. Also, the size of the auditing firm (Category A auditing firms) and the gender of the auditor have a positive moderating role on the relationship between commercialization and Subjective well-being. This moderating effect reflects the higher psychological well-being of large audit firms and evaluates the gender factor as a positive component.

The results show that the growth of commercialization and increasing the tendency to it has an effect on strengthening the psychological well-being of auditing professionals and consequently can be expected to affect the quality of auditing and also reduce the incentives to leave the auditing profession as outputs. Strengthening job satisfaction, mental happiness and psychological work environment is possible due to the commercialization of auditing, and therefore moving towards commercialization and increasing the tendency to this issue can lead to important events in the entire audit profession and ultimately its sustainable development. Therefore, the suggestion to move auditing firms towards commercialization and related mechanisms is based on modeling the process of the world's largest auditing firms, which can be a starting point for the positive consequences of this issue.