Staffing Assignments for Judgment Oriented Audit Tasks: The Effects of Structured Audit Technology and Environment

This study uses an experiment to investigate how structured audit approaches affect managers' human resource assignments in environments vary ing in complexity. Results indicate that consistent with a "knowledge-sharing" role of structured approaches, structured firm managers assigned less experienced audi tors than did unstructured firm managers to perform and to supervise/review a set of judgment-oriented audit tasks. Increased environmental complexity resulted in the assignment of more experienced auditors in unstructured firms, but not in structured firms, which instead increased reliance on specialists. Finally, structured firm managers' staffing assignments were generally less variable than those of unstructured firm managers. Analysis using task-levelstructure measures suggests that task-level structure rather than a firm-level mediating variable is the operational construct.