TY  - JOUR
T1  - Effects of Timing of Advice on Tax Planning Judgments
AU - Pinto, Odette M. 
JO  - International Business Management
VL  - 10
IS  - 26
SP  - 6112
EP  - 6120
PY  - 2016
DA  - 2001/08/19
SN  - 1993-5250
DO  - ibm.2016.6112.6120
UR  - https://makhillpublications.co/view-article.php?doi=ibm.2016.6112.6120
KW  - Advice
KW  -supervisor
KW  -tax professionals
KW  -hierarchical organizations
KW  -judgment
AB  - In many organizations advice is routinely given by supervisors to subordinates. The advice literature
examines the effects of advice on judgment and decision making. This study extends the advice literature into
a practical setting in examining the effects of the timing of supervisory advice on the judgment of subordinate
tax professionals in a professional context. An experiment was conducted with 58 tax professionals from public
accounting firms across Canada, performing tax planning tasks of different complexity. Supervisory advice is
generally given to tax professionals before they commence tax planning tasks but the results of this study
demonstrate that this practice could have detrimental effects. First, advice could be beneficial for a
higher-complexity task but not for a lower-complexity task. Second, advice given before a tax professional
commences a higher-complexity task is found to hinder the insightful judgments often necessary for this task
but advice given after the tax professional prepares a tentative solution does not have this negative effect. This
study contributes to the behavioral and advice literatures. The results of this research study should also be
of interest to hierarchical organizations, including public accounting firms where supervisors routinely provide
advice to subordinates performing tasks of differential complexity.
ER  -