Abstract

For an audit organization, it is important to work toward maintaining

a high error climate to handle errors in an efficient and proper

manner. This means that it is important for accountants to work

towards high quality of work, reduce and manage errors that may

occur in their daily work. Therefore, auditors must know how to

handle errors in order to improve efficiency, which can be affected by

how leadership is exercised in the workplace. The error climate

means being able to act in a manner which will ensure a good job

towards customers but also within the internal operations.

The ethical leadership may thus have an impact on how auditors

handle the error environment both internally and externally. It is very

important for customers to have confidence in the business but also to

maintain the order and the general rules of society for accounting

firms.

My study aims to show the thinkable relationship between ethical

leadership and the error climate. The study included a questionnaire

survey with answers from 113 accountants in Sweden. Three

hypotheses were formulated and the analytical tests showed that there

is a hint of connection between ethical leadership and error climate. A

strong relation was however found between error management and

error climate. The study also shows a weak relation between ethical

leadership and learning from errors in the error climate.

Keywords: Error climate, ethical leadership, error management.