According to the internal control and auditing literatures, “tone at the top” plays an important role in entities' internal control over financial reporting (ICFR) and in auditors' planning and risk assessment decisions. We offer new insights on the relation between tone at the top and audit...

Using unique survey data from Great Place to Work® Institute, we investigate the association of intra-organizational trust (i.e., employees' trust in management) with three aspects of financial reporting: accruals quality, misstatements, and internal control quality. We find that trust is...

While high-quality relationships among employees yield many benefits to organizations, they may have unintended consequences for whistleblowing. In a first experiment, we investigate whether high-quality employee-supervisor relationships reduce employees’ willingness to report supervisor...

In practice, managers and employees often enter into risky, uncertain contracts. Prior works shows that managers use ex post discretion to reduce the effect of uncontrollable “bad luck” on employees' performance-based compensation, but do not use ex post discretion to reduce the effect of...

Prior research finds that controls that induce cooperation among collaborators on a project increase trust, and that this increased trust increases subsequent cooperation among collaborators. We extend this work by investigating how controls influence cooperative behavior in two settings. The...

This study investigates the effect of group-level versus individual-level controls on coworker trust and employee effort. Prior research is limited to controls in one-on-one settings (i.e., one individual imposing a control on another). In contrast, controls in the workplace are often imposed at...

Managers often implement behavioral controls to prevent free riding, especially in group settings where individual effort is difficult to measure. We argue that to the extent these controls signal a norm of self-interest in the workplace, they are likely to result in lower trust and employee...

Prior research provides evidence that behavioral controls imposed in individual settings have a negative effect on trust between employees and managers as well as on employee effort. This study investigates the effect of behavioral controls imposed in a group setting and whether that effect...