Comportamento oportunista nas escolhas contábeis : a influência das emoções e do traço de personalidade

Abstract

Corporate fraud and other harmful practices might find support in accounting. For managers and preparers of financial statements the presence of rules that allow discretion in the choice of practices for recognition and measurement could encourage opportunistic behavior. Opportunistic behavior occurs when someone deliberately departs from the faithful representation of the economic event to benefit himself or others, generating a biased information. The subjects are influenced in their choice by a number of reasons, which may be internal or external nature. The external reasons are derived from capital markets, regulation, contracts, among others, while the internal are connected to the emotions, psychological profile, etc. The objective of this research was to determine whether opportunistic behavior in accounting choices is influenced by emotions and the personality trait of machiavellianism. A questionnaire was developed and 505 valid responses from students in their final year undergraduate and postgraduate were collected. With regard to the data processing, univariate and bivariate descriptive analysis of the variables, factor analysis for the development of the constructs of emotions and machiavellianism, and finally, multinomial logistic regression were performed to study the relationship between accounting choices and the demographic profile the constructs of emotions and machiavellianism. For the emotions, it was observed that while the negative promotes, the positive inhibit opportunistic behavior on accounting choices. About machiavellianism, the results indicate that amorality promotes and the desire to control inhibits opportunistic behavior on accounting choices. Based on the research findings we can infer that internal motivation should be observed, to the extent that positive emotions if promoted by market regulators and academia, and negative, if avoided, may contribute to inhibit corporate fraud.