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The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of political skills of faculty members in Chinese universities on their tendency to obtain knowledge shared by their colleagues, as well as their tendency to share knowledge with their colleagues. Moreover, this study investigated the role of collectivistic culture in a workplace as the moderating variable that may influence the effect of political skill on knowledge sharing.

Survey data were obtained from 387 faculty members across six universities located in the northern and the central cities of China. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used as the statistical method for data analysis.

The results provided significant evidence that supported the positive effect of political skill on knowledge sharing. Furthermore, the moderating effect analysis showed that in the workplaces that had strong collectivist culture, the degree to which employees obtained knowledge shared by others, as well as the willingness of employees to share their knowledge to others, was more likely to happen as compared to that in the workplaces that had a weak collectivist culture.

As part of human capital development policies, political skill training could be an intervention to promote knowledge sharing among faculty members. The training may be particularly helpful to promote knowledge sharing in a workplace that adopts individualistic culture more than in a workplace that adopts collectivistic culture.

This study provided new evidence that extended previous studies by unveiling the moderating effect of collectivist culture in a workplace that was found to reduce the effect of political skill on knowledge sharing.

The paper aims to examine the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity of audit firms.

Using hand-collected data on all Chinese audit firms’ CSR activities from 2007 to 2020, this study constructs two measures to proxy for audit firms’ CSR engagement: a dummy variable to indicate whether an auditor engages in CSR activities in year t and the frequency with which auditors conduct CSR activities in year t. The authors use ordinary least squares regression as a baseline methodology, along with the entropy balancing method and instrumental variable approach to alleviate potential endogeneity concerns.

The baseline results show that socially responsible audit firms provide higher quality audit services than their counterparts. In particular, the authors find that clients audited by socially responsible audit firms are less likely to receive an aggressively clean opinion. Moreover, the findings suggest that CSR activities related to community and employees are more relevant in improving audit quality compared with those related to other dimensions of CSR. Further analyses show that capital markets and audit clients react positively to audit-firm CSR activity. Audit firms engaging in CSR increase their audit inputs in response to risky clients, as compared with their counterparts. Finally, cross-sectional analyses show that the positive relationship is more pronounced for non-Big 4 and non-industry experts and is attenuated by within-firm geographic dispersion. In terms of client characteristics, the positive effect of audit-firm CSR is stronger when their clients face the higher financial risk or have lower CSR awareness than others. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the ethical view of audit-firm CSR engagement.

The study advances investors’ understanding of audit-firm CSR engagement and helps them evaluate the credibility of audited financial reports. Besides, the findings may also help guide the audit firms to conduct more CSR activities and help guide the audit clients to choose CSR audit firms.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first large-sample evidence by empirically examining the association between audit-firm CSR activity and audit service performance. Besides, this paper also explores audit-firm CSR activity from two competing perspectives, thereby providing a comprehensive understanding of this issue. Finally, this work responds to the call for more CSR research in emerging markets.