Field Dependence and Accountants' Confidence in Decisions

Witkin, et al.'s Embedded Figures Test was administered to 54 accountants from selected accounting firms in Australia. In addition subjects were provided with Human Resources Accounting information' through a case scenario and asked to make certain decisions on a personnel layoff problem. They were also asked to state their level of confidence (0 to 100) that the decision they had made was optimal. The Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance indicated that field-dependent accountants were significantly more confident in their decisions than field-independent accountants.