An exploration of the espoused organizational cultures of public accounting firms

This study measures and describes the "espoused" organizational cultures of 11 chartered accounting firms. Following a similar research method to Kabanoff (1992, 1993), cluster analysis is used to classify each accounting firm's espoused organizational culture into one of four "ideal" culture types - elite, leadership, meritocratic or collegial. This is achieved by the use of computer-aided textual analysis which classifies and counts the frequency of value statements and themes made in a variety of organizational documents. The organizational documents collected from participating accounting firms consisted of strategic plans, staff manuals, performance appraisal forms (termed "internal" documents) and client bulletins and recruitment brochures (termed "external" documents). These documents facilitated a test of the consistency in espoused organizational culture: values projected to external parties as compared to the values espoused or transmitted to internal parties within the firm. Given the relatively small number of documents (N = 21) and firms (N = 11) included in the study, meaningful statistical analysis was not possible. However, using the unadjusted results generated by Quick Cluster, inferences have been made from the culture classifications and associated evidence in reviewing support, or otherwise, for the research issues identified. The analysis conducted indicated that there are only limited differences in the organizational cultures espoused externally by accounting firms, regardless of the size of the practice. However, the results also indicate that messages or signals projected to outside parties through external documents, are significantly different to the messages and signals conveyed to staff members. These findings suggest that public accounting firms have a uniform (external) organizational culture, but are heterogenous with respect to internal value sets. This result supports the need for further research into this distinctive cultural split, in interpreting the behavior of accounting firms.