Assistant Professor Kelsey Dworkis, PhD, recently attended the Accounting Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand (AFAANZ) conference in Adelaide, South Australia. This conference combines all the accounting and finance professors and professionals from Australia and New Zealand together to share their research. She was one of the few international professors who attended, as she is coauthoring a paper with Dr. Naomi Soderstrom of the University of Melbourne. At this conference, Dr. Dworkis presented two of her finished papers that were coauthored by School of Accountancy faculty both centering around the topic of narcissism.
The first paper she presented, “Asymmetric Responses to Multiple Performance Measures: the Role of Non-Pathological Narcissism,” was coauthored with Dr. Lorenzo Patelli. This paper focuses on the variance of responses under multidimensional performance evaluations, which is studied through two different experiments, specifically in relation to narcissists. For this paper, Dr. Dworkis and Dr. Patelli conducted their experiments through the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk to get a wide range of participants.
The second paper Dr. Dworkis presented was also coauthored with Daniels faculty, Dr. Adam Greiner and Dr. Lisa Victoravich, called “Weakened Reporting: The Effects of Bonus Compensation, Clawback Regime, and Narcissism on Whistleblowing.” With this paper, they discuss whether effects of clawback and bonus compensation have more of an impact on individuals who exhibit narcissism. They found that those with more narcissistic characteristics would be less willing to report fraud if they were receiving higher bonuses by not blowing the whistle, however they would be willing to blow the whistle if it would bring them notoriety.
In addition to presenting her papers, Dr. Dworkis was able to learn about research that can be applied to Managerial Accounting and general accounting courses. One of the main topics discussed between Dr. Dworkis and the other conference attendees is the role that technology will play in the field of accounting going forward, not just in the educational aspect but in the logistical way it will affect the markets of large companies and independent companies. On this topic she said, “Increasingly there’s a demand for technology and the integration of accounting and data…. A lot of these larger companies are now moving into entirely, almost autonomous accounting systems. Some of the startups that are coming out don’t even have an accounting or finance department, it’s all code base. I think there will be in the next five to ten years a big shift in the roles that accountants take on in companies.”