Abstrack:
One of the most striking phenomena in recent years has been the increasing proportion of women in the labor force, enabling women in many fields to use their potential and to achieve economic independence. This phenomenon raises the gender issues, in particular job promotion, compensation, and professional responsibility. Therefore, the gender structure analysis becomes more and more important to society and economic development. Accounting research lacks the study of gender issues. It is important to understand the career advancement prospects from gender standpoint. This study examines the impact of gender on role overload, inter-role conflict, and coping behavior. The study also considers factors associated with gender perspectives to build role of academic accountant in workplace. Hypotheses are developed and tested through a survey study among 53 academic accountants in Semarang public universities. Our results show that there are no significant gender differences in role overload, inter-role conflict, and coping behavior; however, women are perceived to have more favorable chances to use reactive coping behavior than men. This is consistent with prior research (Reed et al., 1994) which suggests that women accountants expressing preferences with closely associated actual behavior. We found that coping behavior play an important role in determining the appropriate solution strategy to overcome role overload and inter-role conflict by concerning the redefinitive and accommodative approach. In addition, we found that attribution value of individual behavior align with the attribution theory generally, which is needed to verify the cause and effect relationship of individual behavior. This finding consistent with literature (Gibson, 1994) which describes three factors in attribution determinant, they are: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency. Overall, the paper contributes to the extant literature on behavioral accounting by providing empirical evidence in terms of the effectiveness of human resources management in higher educational institutions. Further, in gender issue, this study complements prior research to explore the preventive steps in discrimination perception among academic accountants in workplace. Suggestions regarding areas for future research are offered, and implications for practitioners are identified.
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