Date of Award

Summer 2002

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Department

Marketing and Analysis

First Advisor

Hani Mesak

Abstract

The objectives of this dissertation were to empirically examine (i) the primary value orientation of CPA firms' managers; (ii) the value profile of these managers; (iii) the relationship between the personal value systems of CPA firm's managers and their managerial decisions, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and managerial success; (iv) whether the personal value systems of CPA firms' differ by gender or age; (v) differences between the personal value systems of CPA firm's managers affiliated with the departments of auditing, taxation, consulting, information technology, general administration, or others, and (vi) differences between the personal value systems of CPA firms' managers and their counterparts in other industries.

To shed light on the above issues, the following instruments are utilized: England's (1967) Personal Value Questionnaire (PVQ), England's (1975) Behavioral Measurement Questionnaire (BMQ), Brayfield and Rothe's (1951) Global Measure Questionnaire (GMQ) of Job satisfaction, and Mowday et al's. (1979) Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ).

A national sample of 1,000 CPA firms' managers (500 managers of small and medium size CPA firms and 500 managers of the Big-five CPA firms) were randomly selected from the AICPA list of members. The assistance of James Foster, the director of the AICPA membership, who provided the mailing list and randomly selected the sample from the fifty states is appreciated. Responses were received from 231 CPA firms' managers, yielding a response rate of 23.1 percent. Because 8 of the returned questionnaires were incomplete, 223 questionnaires were usable.

To validate dissertation's propositions, a host of statistical techniques were employed. These techniques include factor analysis, multivariate analysis of variance, a stepwise logistic regression analysis, Least Square means, Duncan test, Spearman correlation coefficients, and Wilcoxon nonparametric test.

The findings of this study were: (1) the primary value orientation of CPA firms' managers are pragmatic, rather than moralistic or affect, (2) the majority of the personal value questionnaire concepts assigned by CPA firms' managers fall in the operative values cell in their constructed personal value profile, (3) there is a significant relationship between these managers' personal values systems and their managerial decisions, (4) there is a significant relationship between these managers' personal values systems and their job satisfaction, (5) there is a significant relationship between these managers' personal values systems and their organizational commitment, (6) there is a significant relationship between these managers' personal values systems and their managerial success, (7) there are significant differences in the personal value systems of female and male managers, (8) there are significant differences in the personal value systems of younger and older managers, (9) there are significant differences in the personal value systems of departments' managers, and (10) there are no significant differences in the personal value systems of CPA firms' managers and the personal value systems of their counterparts in other industries.

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