The influence of a business-process focus on category knowledge and internal control evaluation

This study examines whether organizing information about internal controls around business processes instead of control objectives produces stronger category knowledge during training and improves decision performance during internal control evaluation. Novices who were trained to evaluate internal controls using business-process-focused materials developed stronger category knowledge. After training, novices who evaluated internal controls using materials organized around a process focus identified more control issues during a control evaluation task. Findings suggest that the process focus may be a more effective framework for organizing internal control evaluation tasks.