Proceedings of Eurasia Business Research Conference
4 - 6 June 2015, Nippon Hotel, Istanbul, Turkey, ISBN: 978-1-922069-77-1
Personality Types and Accounting Subfields
Shahriar M. Saadullah, Zaki Abu Shawish and Abdul
Quddoos Abdul Basith
Objective
Accountants have been categorized as Conventional among the six well1
known Holland’s personality types (Holland 1997) . We argue that the personality
type of successful accountants depend on their respected subfields. In this paper
we have subdivided the accountants into three categories; Financial
Accountants, Managerial Accountants, and Auditors. We posit that while
Conventional individuals are likely to be successful Financial Accountants
following prior findings, but Enterprising and Investigative individuals are more
likely to be successful Managerial Accountants and Auditors respectively.
Period of study and methodology
The study was conducted in 2014 using 99 students from an AACSB
accredited business school in the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region. To
test our position, we hypothesized that accounting students who are
conventional, enterprising, and investigative perform better in financial
accounting, managerial accounting, and auditing courses respectively. We
collected the data regarding the personality of students using a well-established
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(Amstrong 2008) instrument and compared that data with the grades in
accounting courses. We tested our hypotheses using stepwise regression and
we used the following model:
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Course Grade = f(RIASEC , Year, GPA, Age, Gender)
Findings and Implications
We found support for our hypothesis that enterprising students perform
better in managerial accounting classes but did not find strong support for the
other two hypotheses. The results of this study could help the accountants and
the profession in a couple of useful ways. If the relationships we hypothesized
can be further supported with future studies, then accountants could choose the
subfields they would be most suitable for and the employers would be able to find
the best fit for specific accounting jobs.
Track: Accounting
Dr. Shahriar M. Saadullah, CPA, Dr. Zaki Abu Shawish, Abdul Quddoos Abdul Basith
Department of Accounting and Information System, College of Business and Economics, Qatar
University, PO Box 2713, Doha Qatar, ssaad@qu.edu.qa
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Corresponding Author
Holland, J. L. (1997). Making Vocational Choices. Florida: Psychology Assessment Resources,
Inc.
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Armstrong, P. I., W. Allison, and J. Rounds. (2008). Development and initial validation of brief
public domain RIASEC marker scales. Journal of Vocational Behavior 73: 287–299.
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Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional
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