My research interests center around how accountants make judgments and decisions in a work environment driven by automation, artificial intelligence, and distributed work. I am particularly fascinated by how accountants' needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness influence performance and well-being outcomes.
I find research questions that integrate accounting disciplines fascinating and strive to be methods agnostic. In order words, I try to let the research question drive the methods used. That said, my training is primarily in behavioral methods, including interview-based qualitative and experimental methods.
My dissertation explores the interaction between motivation quality and autonomy on auditor creativity and subsequent audit judgments in an analytical procedure context. Specifically, I examine how the quality of auditor's motivation for work and the level of decision-making autonomy provided within the audit engagement influence the generation of divergent explanations to a significant variance. Further, I examine how the generation of divergent explanations is associated with auditors’ beliefs about the reasonableness of management's explanation for the variance and their intentions to collect additional explanations and audit evidence. Preliminary findings suggest that providing auditors with a prompt to consider higher quality motivation for work (i.e., interest and value in work) results in a greater generation of divergent hypotheses compared to auditors who are prompted to consider lower quality motivation for work (i.e., monetary rewards and promotion opportunities). Auditors who generate a greater number of divergent hypotheses place a lower reliance on management's explanation for the variance and, in turn, have a greater intention to collect additional evidence to explain the variance. However, this finding is contingent upon auditors having expertise in the accounting and task domain. I do not find a significant influence of decision making autonomy or auditors' inherent, or trait, motivation for work.
Current Status: Successfully defended the dissertation proposal March 2022 with expected final defense in June 2022.
I am an accountant by trade, a teacher at heart, and aspiring researcher.
I registered as a prospective accounting and criminology double major my first semester in college and never looked back. In the spring semester of my senior year, I took an internship at a Big 4 Accounting firm which transitioned to full-time employment after obtaining the necessary education requirement for the certified public accountant (CPA) certification. I worked as an external auditor for four years on mid-sized public company audit engagements. The mid-sized engagements allowed me to gain experience with all phases of the audit from planning to execution and with both aspects of the integrated audit (i.e. internal controls and substantive procedures). I loved the big picture tasks within the audit. For example, I enjoyed figuring out how all of the pieces of the audit related to each other and with the firm guidance. Due to turnover on the engagement, I was responsible for developing the audit plan for the internal control audit and was the main point of contact with the internal audit department at the client. During my short tenure, I was also involved in two inspections, an internal inspection and PCAOB inspection, and saw first-hand the impact of inspections on the audit process. These experiences provide the baseline for the research questions I find interesting.
I loved the people, I loved the challenge, and I loved training the younger staff, but I did not see myself as an audit partner. In the pre-remote work environment, I did not see a path to move out of Assurance and into a Quality or Learning role within the firm without moving to New York or Atlanta. Therefore, I left EY to pursue academia in 2016. Prior to joining the doctoral program at USF in the Fall of 2018, I spent a year and a half as an adjunct professor at USF Sarasota-Manatee and Florida Southern College and a visiting instructor position at the University of Tampa. I taught introductory managerial, introductory financial, and AIS courses using various teaching formats (i.e., in-person, hybrid, and online). The variety of my teaching experiences forced me to quickly adapt to different course delivery formats, textbooks, and students which helped me establish my teaching style early in my academic career. Further, they showed me that I could make a greater contribution to the profession if I were to obtain a Ph.D.
My experiences from high school to college to my career in public accounting have shaped how I approach research. I am most intrigued by the “how” and “why” questions as a result of my dual major in accounting and criminology. I believe that the world is complex and that the characteristics of the person, task, and environment all play a role in explaining phenomena. I do not believe it is practical to select the best method to address the research question if there is no opportunity for publication. I identify more with the interpretivism paradigm, however, the pervasiveness of positivism in the accounting discipline requires me to adopt a positivist or post-positivist approach to most research designs.
Papers within each section are listed in order of completion with those closest to submission listed first.
Cainas, J. and J. Kralik. The Great Accounting Escape: A Teaching Tool for Relevant Costing and Special Decisions. Preparing for submission to Issues in Accounting Education
Method: Teaching Case; Status: Under Review at Issues in Accounting Education
Cainas, J., C. Jozsi and J. Kralik. Educating Tomorrow's Accounting Professional.
Method: Multi-Method (Survey and Interview); Status: Collecting additional interview data.
Demek, K., J. Kralik, and R. Mautz. The Upskilled Accountant: An Examination of Accounting’s Digital Transformation
Method: Survey; Status: Data Collection
Baaske, B., J. Cainas and J. Kralik. Practice, Practice, Practice: An Examination of Different Pedagogical Tools on Student’s Recall and Transfer of Knowledge when Completing Practice Problems
Method: Experimental; Stage: Submitted to Issues in Accounting Education’s Call for Registered Reports
Demek, K., J. Kralik, T. Thornock, and C. Denison. Looking to the Past or to the Future: The Effect of Investment Progress and Progress Report Saliency on Continuing Capital Investment Decisions.
Method: Experimental; Status: preparing for submission to A* journal
Kralik, J. Do PCAOB Inspections Continue to Improve the Quality of Internal Control Audits?
Method: Archival; Status: 2nd Year Paper in process of collecting additional data
Carrillo, H. and J. Kralik. Combatting Virtual Fatigue with Interstitial Videos: An Investigation of Auditor Performance
Method: Experimental; Status: Soliciting Feedback on Design at 2022 AIS New Scholars Consortium
Kralik, J. Auditor’s Judgments and Challenges with Identifying and Selecting Controls for Testing
Method: Qualitative; Status: Seminar Proposal and Soliciting Feedback on revised motivation at 2022 AIS New Scholars Consortium
2021 Bea Sanders/AICPA Innovation in Teaching Award for "The Great Accounting Escape: A Teaching Tool for Relevant Costing and Special Decisions" with Jennifer Cainas.
2021 Jim Bulloch Award for Innovation in Managerial Accounting for "The Great Accounting Escape: A Teaching Tool for Relevant Costing and Special Decisions" with Jennifer Cainas.
Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) sponsored Outstanding Education Case Award during the AIS/SET Midyear Meeting 2021 for "The Great Accounting Escape: A Teaching Tool for Relevant Costing and Special Decisions" with Jennifer Cainas.
Conference Participant Reviewer Discussant Moderator
AAA Annual 2019 - 2021 2019 - 2021 2019 - 2020 2019, 2021
AAA Auditing Midyear 2019 - 2022 2021 2021
AAA AIS /SET Midyear 2019 - 2022 2019, 2021, 2022 2019, 2021
AAA ABO 2020 - 2021 2021 2021
AAA SPARK Meeting 2020 - 2021 2021
Florida Behavioral
Research Symposium 2019 - 2021
AIS Educators 2021
Other Workshop and Conference Attendance
East Coast Behavioral Workshops 2020 - 2022
“Looking to the Past or to the Future: The Effect of Investment Progress and Progress Report Saliency on Continuing Capital Investment Decisions”
2021 BYU Accounting Research Symposium
2021 Florida Behavioral Research Symposium
“The Great Accounting Escape: A Teaching Tool for Relevant Costing and Special Decisions” with Jennifer Cainas.
2021 AIS Midyear Meeting
2021 Conference on Teaching and Learning in Accounting
2021 AAA Annual Meeting
“Educating Tomorrow's Accounting Professional”
2021 AIS Educators Conference
2021 AAA Annual Meeting
“Auditor’s Judgments and Challenges with Identifying and Selecting Controls for Testing”
2020 Florida Behavioral Research Symposium (FBARS)
Invited Speaker 2020 Junior Accounting Scholars Organization (JASO) Workshop
“Upcoming Changes to Lease Accounting: Farewell to Off Balance Sheet Financing” Honors Undergraduate Thesis.
2011 Tampa Bay CPA Group Seminar