Evaluating group identity and professional identity of institutional employees in promoting the function of social capital in the auditing profession

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
mojtaba rahimi 1
seyed abbas barhani 1
javad rezazadeh 2
omid faraji 3
1 Department of Accounting, Qom Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qom, Iran
2 Associate Professor, Department of Accounting, University of Management and Economics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
3 Associate Professor, Department of Financial Management and Accounting, School of Management and Accounting, Farabi Campus, University of Tehran, Qom, Iran
10.22034/jmaak.2025.78190.4462
Abstract
Legitimizing the auditing profession in terms of social standing is an issue that has often been challenging to achieve a framework for understanding due to the prevalence of professional conflicts and expectations gaps. This study essentially seeks to answer the question of whether the development of emerging aspects of social capital will result in differences between the professional identity functions of employees in individual and group identities in auditing firms. The present study, while proposing hypotheses through text mining methods, qualitative two-phase analyses, and then using the Delphi method based on two criteria of mean and agreement coefficient, seeks to measure the reliability of the criteria derived from the RapidMiner stage so that they can be explained in the context of the study in the quantitative phase. In the quantitative phase of the study, analysis of variance is also used to determine the differences in the social capital functions of auditing firms under professional identity and group identity in the target society. Based on the results, the structure of audit firms requires group identity formation in order to benefit from the capacities of specialized strategy in a competitive market. Therefore, group identity in audit firms should be considered as one of the internal capabilities, a basis for stimulating social capital functions, and professional identity, which is the basis of social identity in auditing and considers the functions of individual performance of auditors in the firm, has a higher capacity for the occurrence of the success function than the spirituality function in influencing the functions of social capital.
Keywords
Group identity
professional identity
social capital
employees of auditing firms
auditing profession
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