In conclusion, in this article we relied on the disciplines of sociology and organizational behavior to formulate hypotheses regarding the way in which professional accountants’ independence commitment is likely to be influenced by variables related to their work and cultural environment.
These disciplines have been generally quite neglected in behavioral, quantitatively oriented accounting research, whose perspectives of analysis are usually informed by psychology (Meyer and Rigsby, 2001).
However, by focusing on processes internal to the individual, psychologically based studies inevitably downplay the incidence of the socio organizational context in which individuals make judgments and decisions (e.g. Ashton and Ashton, 1995; Gibbins and Swieringa, 1995).
In this article, we aimed to provide a persuasive demonstration of bringing sociology and organizational behavior in quantitative behavioral accounting research – as corpora of knowledge that can be appropriately relied upon to examine the link between accountants’ attitudes and socio- organizational variables.