An error management perspective on audit quality: Toward a multi-level model

Abstract We take an error management perspective on audit quality. Drawing on 18 months of participant observations and 38 interviews conducted in a Big 4 accounting firm, we develop a multi-level model of error management. With this model, we propose how organizational structures, team procedures and practices, and individual cognitions and emotions interact to manage errors. The multi-level model of error management allows us to conceptually integrate previous behavioral and social research on audit quality, contributes to the rising accounting firm error management literature, and explains how and why two general approaches from the broader error management literature to errors that are usually considered as opposing each other, i.e., error prevention and error resilience, may interact and actually entail each other in accounting firms.