Personality Types And Accounting Subfields

Abstract

Accountants have been categorized as Conventional among the six well-known Holland's personality types (Holland 1997). We argue that the personality type of successful accountants depend on their respected subfield. In this paper we have subdivided the accountants into three categories; Financial Accountants, Managerial Accountants, and Auditors. We hypothesize that while Conventional individuals are likely to be successful Financial Accountants, Enterprising and Investigative individuals are more likely to be successful Managerial Accountants and Auditors respectively. We find support for our hypothesis that enterprising students perform better in managerial accounting classes but we fail to find support for the other two hypotheses. Implications are discussed.