Investigation of the Effect of Auditors’ Professionalism Levels on their Judgment to Resolve the Conflict between Auditor and Management

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of auditors’ professionalism levels on their judgment to resolve the conflict between management and auditor. Professionalism has been investigated at the two levels of high and low. In addition, in this investigation, professional judgment has a mediator role in the effect of the professionalism feature on the resolution of the conflict between auditor and management. In the present paper, in order to collect the data and the theoretical foundations of the research, the field and library methods are respectively used and the tools used in the present study are standard questionnaires and note taking. The statistical population of the research is professional auditors and accountants, among whom the desired sample is determined and selected using respectively the Cochran's formula and random sampling method. In the research, the approval of the relationships between variables and factors is carried out through confirmatory factor analysis and PLS modeling technique using PLS2 SMART software, which is a variance based path modeling technique that provides the possibility of the simultaneous investigation of the theory and measures. In addition, using the Sobel test, the assumption of the mediator role of the professional judgment variable has been examined. The results indicated that auditors’ professionalism is effective on professional judgment. They also showed that professional judgment has an impact on the conflict between auditor and management, but professionalism doesn’t have any impact on it and professional judgment doesn’t play a moderator role in the effect of professionalism on the conflict between auditor and management.