Walk into the finance department of almost any large company and you’ll find two kinds of accountants doing what looks, on paper, like the same job. One sticks to the numbers: reports, reconciliations, budgets. The other is in meetings with operational managers, helping them think through pricing, investments, or cost-cutting plans. They share a job title. They don’t share a workday.
What explains the difference? A study published in Accounting, Organizations and Society suggests that part of the answer lies in personality, and in whether individual accountants quietly rewrite their own job descriptions to pursue work they find more meaningful.
The puzzle of the “business partner”
For roughly two decades, the management accounting field has talked about a shift away from “number-crunching” and toward “business partnering,” where accountants serve as internal advisors who sit alongside managers during decision-making. Most research on this shift has treated it as something that happens from the top down: senior leaders decide the role should change, and the accounting staff adjusts. Earlier studies also tended to treat accountants in a given organization as a single group responding to the same push.
Paula Dirks of the University of Groningen and her colleagues Sandra Tillema (also at Groningen) and Rouven Trapp (Ulm University) wanted to flip that perspective. What if business partnering isn’t just something handed down from above, but something individual accountants carve out for themselves? And if so, what makes one accountant more likely than another to do that carving?
A personality trait called plasticity
The researchers built their investigation on two ideas from other fields. The first is “job crafting,” a concept from organizational psychology describing how employees quietly reshape the boundaries of their jobs, taking on new tasks, changing who they interact with, or reframing the purpose of their work, in order to find more meaning in it.
The second idea comes from personality research. The familiar “Big Five” personality traits (openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability) can be grouped into two higher-level clusters. One of them, called “plasticity,” combines openness to experience and extraversion. People who score high on plasticity tend to be curious, exploratory, socially engaged, and drawn to novelty. The opposite of plasticity isn’t stability, the researchers note, but rigidity.
The team’s hypothesis was essentially a chain. Accountants higher in plasticity would be more inclined to reshape their jobs. That reshaping, in turn, would pull them toward business partnering, because partnering offers the kind of varied, social, influential work that tends to feel meaningful. And the organizational context might amplify or dampen that pull.
Surveying a European bank
To test the idea, the researchers surveyed management accountants at a large European bank with 113 branches. The bank’s structure offered something unusual: it officially distinguishes between two kinds of accountants. “Business controllers” are formally expected to act as sparring partners and think-ahead advisors. “Other controllers” are formally expected to implement standard processes and monitor compliance. Only the first group has business partnering baked into the job description.
That distinction let the team separate what the bank formally asked of an accountant from what the accountant actually did. Out of 1,291 accountants invited, 290 provided complete responses, resulting in a final sample of 271. The survey measured their involvement in business partnering (through eight decision-support tasks, such as developing cost-saving plans or analyzing product profitability), the extent to which they crafted their jobs, their personality traits using an established Big Five inventory, and the tightness of financial control in their unit.
What the data showed
The results lined up with the theory. Accountants who scored higher on plasticity reported more job crafting. Accountants who engaged in more job crafting, in turn, reported more involvement in business partnering. Statistically, job crafting linked plasticity to business partnering: the personality trait didn’t predict partnering directly, but it predicted the self-initiated reshaping of work that led there.
The organizational context mattered too. In units where managers faced tight financial control (pressure to hit targets, close scrutiny of financial results, low tolerance for missing numbers) the link between job crafting and business partnering grew stronger. The researchers interpret this as evidence that when financial analysis really matters to managers, accountants sense a bigger payoff from partnering and lean into it harder.
One finding stood out. When the researchers split the sample by formal role, the mediation effect (personality → job crafting → business partnering) held mainly for the “other controllers,” the ones whose job descriptions didn’t require business partnering at all. Among accountants formally expected to be business partners, plasticity still predicted partnering, but not through job crafting, perhaps because for them, adjusting toward partnering was simply part of the formal job rather than something that felt like stepping outside it.
When the team looked at the two components of plasticity separately, openness to experience did most of the work. Extraversion on its own didn’t significantly predict business partnering through job crafting. In other words, the intellectual curiosity half of the trait seems to matter more than the social half.
The researchers also noticed that the bank’s business controllers scored higher on plasticity than the other controllers, suggesting the organization either selects for the trait when filling those roles or that such people gravitate toward them.
Implications for organizations
The authors argue that business partnering isn’t purely a product of top-down decisions or org-chart redesigns. It can emerge from the bottom up, through the quiet initiative of individuals whose personalities incline them to expand what their jobs look like. That’s a different story than the one typically told in the literature.
For companies, the study implies that hiring and selection can shape the finance function’s character. If an organization wants its accountants to act more as advisors than as score-keepers, recruiting people higher in plasticity, particularly in openness to experience, may help get there. Tight financial control, the researchers note, also appears to encourage accountants to lean into the partnering role.
But the authors are careful to point out that job crafting isn’t automatically good for employers. Sometimes organizations genuinely want their accountants to stay in a more conventional role, focused on monitoring and accurate reporting. An accountant who crafts their way into business partnering when the organization needs a disciplined watchdog could be a problem, not an asset. The bank in the study appeared to want its “other controllers” to stay within their formal boundaries, even as some of them crafted their way past those lines.
Caveats
The study has limits worth keeping in mind. It’s based on a survey at a single bank, which constrains how broadly the findings can be generalized. Survey data can’t establish causation, only association. The researchers tested for common biases in self-reported surveys and found no evidence of them, but the design still relies on accountants describing their own behavior and personality.
The authors also note that they surveyed only the accountants themselves, not the managers who work with them. A manager’s view of whether the partnership actually works, or is even wanted, would add a useful dimension to the picture, and they suggest it as a direction for future research, along with looking at how teams composed of accountants with different personalities navigate tensions between partnering and compliance roles.
What the work offers, in the meantime, is a view of the accounting function as something more individually shaped than it is often made out to be. Two accountants in matching chairs with matching titles may be doing meaningfully different jobs, and part of the reason may be who they are.
