Accountants’ satisfaction following unification of Canadian accounting bodies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to assess the levels of satisfaction of legacy designation accountants, namely, Chartered Accountants (CAs), Certified General Accountants (CGAs) and Certified Management Accountants, under the new Chartered Professional Accountants (CPA) banner; to measure differences in satisfaction among the three designations; and to identify the factors associated with the levels of satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach A 30-item questionnaire was designed, pilot tested for face validity and further tested for reliability using a Cronbach’s alpha. The questionnaire consisted of three parts: sociodemographic questions, bipolar questions to fit the SERVQUAL model of satisfaction and questions about professional identity and general perceptions of the new CPA organization. Findings Legacy accountants in Ontario had a lower level of satisfaction than they expected before unification. A pre- and post-unification comparison found statistically significant differences on all five dimensions of the SERVQUAL model and on overall service. Responses to questions about professional identity and general perceptions of the new organization were mixed. An analysis of variance test revealed a statistically significant difference in satisfaction between CAs and the two other designations – CAs were the least satisfied. A varimax rotated factor analysis indicated that the SERVQUAL’s five dimensions appear to be good predictors of service quality. Research limitations/implications Merging professional cultures can be as challenging as merging companies. Increased membership volume needs to translate into additional benefits and services. As indicated by the respondents, the new CPA entity has much work to do, particularly with the former CAs. Originality/value This is the first study to examine satisfaction, specifically following the merger of the three accounting designations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".