Factors Affecting Students’ Intention To Become Professional Accountant In Selected Malaysian Universities

Literature review and Hypotheses development

Career intention or career path is concluded as a life journey of a person that must be planned at their early stage of their career (Yusoff et al., 2011). Being dedicated to a cause or goal is called commitment meanwhile an intention is a thing intended with aim and plan (Singh & Gupta, 2015). Therefore, students’ commitment intention is important to determine how committed the students are with their intention to become a professional accountant and what factors that might influenced them.

Intrinsic creates enjoyment in the task performed which come from their internal perspectives and this factor has been a significant predictor in terms of career choices (Jackling & Calero, 2006; Sugahara & Boland, 2009). Intrinsic motivation includes self-satisfaction, creativity, autonomy and dynamic environment (Hasio & Nova, 2016). Intrinsic creates pleasure and enjoyment in the task performed and exists internally within individual (Ahmad et al., 2015). Thing and Jalaludin (2018) found an association between intrinsic motivation and career. Most of the accounting undergraduates intentionally choose their career path in accounting field because they found that accounting is interesting, dynamic and challenging apart from their own belief that they capabilities in this field such as doing calculation.

H1a: Intrinsic motivation is significantly related to accounting students’ intention to become a professional accountant in selected Malaysian universities.

Extrinsic motivation is related to the monetary rewards, job opportunities, high salary and recognition. According to Hutaibat (2012), undergraduate accounting students choose a career in accountancy are possibly because of the job opportunities and the higher income rate. Additionally, extrinsic motivation is a kind of reward-driven behaviour such as greater job demand expectation and the prestige feeling of being a professional accountant (Fernandez & Matos Pena, 2017). A person accept the task or work due to the external rewards and not because of the self-satisfaction and this is also supported by Bainbridge (2015) who stated that a person may agree to perform a task even though they do not enjoy when performing the task. He argues that these are the external factors that motivates most of the accounting students to become a professional accountant. Better job opportunities in accounting area also can be the most important factor that could influence students to be a professional accountant as their career (Harnovinsah, 2017). However, Jackling and Calero (2006), Law and Yuen (2012) found an insignificant relationship between extrinsic motivation and the students' intention.

H1b: Extrinsic motivation is significantly related to accounting students’ intention to become a professional accountant in selected Malaysian universities.

Subjective norms have been known as personal matters that influence the decision making for a person. These factors are also affecting the student intentions in pursuing their accounting career. Subjective norms are the reasons why a person choose other than accounting careers. Undergraduate students might change their mind throughout the accounting program due to personal suggestions or influences from their friends and family. Suki et al. (2011) state that subjective norms is an opinion of what their close peers believe the individual should do. This indicate that their decision are not generally made by them but also the people around them. Ahmad et al. (2015) evidenced a significant relationship between subjective norms and the students’ intention to pursue in accounting career.

H1c: Subjective norms is significantly related to accounting students’ intention to become a professional accountant in selected Malaysian universities.

Self-efficacy is the other factor that influence undergraduate students’ career intentions which is known as an individual belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task and to produce specific performance attainment (Bandura, 1994). Confidence can be developed from self-efficacy which enable the students to solve problems and difficult task. Self-efficacy can be developed by mastering and gaining experience for an appealing idea and practice the skills obtained during internship. With the skills and practice obtained, they can master in performing specific task. James (2008) found that low self-efficacy contributes to shortage number of accountants. Ahmad et al. (2015) and Hayes and Credle (2008), proved students with greater self-efficacy have higher intention in pursuing accounting career.

H1d: Self-efficacy is significantly related to accounting students’ intention to become a professional accountant in selected Malaysian universities.

This study employed the Self-Determination Theory as this theory is widely used by previous studies to describe one's behaviour in making decisions as it explain the goal –directed behaviour of an individual (Deci & Ryan, 2000). As shown in Figure 1 , since the predictors involve both internal and external factors that may affect the students’ intention, therefore this theory is appropriate to be used in the current study.

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Reliability analysis

Reliability test was performed to measure reliability of the questions. Cronbach’s Alpha for all the variables ranging from 0.842 to 0.917, which indicate that the items have good internal consistency and stability as the values of Cronbach’s Alpha are between 0.65 to 0.95 (Chua, 2009).

Descriptive statistic

Table 02 presents the descriptive statistics of the respondents' demographic profile. Majority of the respondents are female and Year 3. Most of them have a CGPA of 3.00 above and have accounting background. More than 50% of the respondents are from private university.

After excluding incomplete responses, the final sample is 183. Hence, the study applies the Central Limit Theorem which assume a normal distribution as the sample size is greater than 30. Hence, parametric tests are used to test the hypotheses.

Correlation analysis

This study also performed multicollinearity test through a correlation analysis. The Pearson’s correlation matrix in Table 03 shows that no multicollinearity problems exists as none of the independent variables having coefficients of greater than 0.9 (Chua, 2009), thus, meet another assumption to conduct the regression analysis.

Regression analysis

The first objective of the study is to investigate factors affecting the students' intention to become professional accountants. Using multiple regression analysis, the empirical model used to test the hypotheses are as follows:

$CPit\mathrm{}=\mathrm{}\mathrm{}\beta \mathrm{0}\mathrm{}+\mathrm{}\beta \mathrm{1}CIit\mathrm{}+\mathrm{}\beta \mathrm{2}IMit\mathrm{}+\mathrm{}\beta \mathrm{3}EMit\mathrm{}+\mathrm{}\beta \mathrm{4}SNit\mathrm{}+\mathrm{}+\mathrm{}\beta \mathrm{5}SEit\mathrm{}+\mathrm{}\mathrm{}it$

Where,

SIit=Students' intention

IMit=Intrinsic Motivation

EMit=Extrinsic Motivation

SNit=Subjective Norms

SEit=Self-Efficacy

it=Error term

The result of multiple regression about the effects of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, subjective norms and self-efficacy on students' intention, is presented in Table 04 . The result provide evidences that only intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation significantly affect the students' intention to become professional accountants (p<0.05). The two types of motivations accounts 53.1% of the variations in the students' intention (F=5.390), signifying that another 46.9% might be influenced by other factors. The other two predictors, namely; subjective norms and self-efficacy fail to meet the selection criteria (p>.05), therefore, H1c and H1d is rejected.

In terms of intrinsic motivation, the b-value in Table 04 indicates that as intrinsic motivation increases by 1 unit, students' intention to become professional accountant increase by 0.380 unit. The result shows that accounting students' internal factors such as their own internal interest in accounting influence their intention to become professional accountant, and it supports Ahmad et al. (2015) and Thing and Jalaludin (2018) who also found a significant positive relationship.

The b-value for extrinsic motivation shows that as extrinsic motivation increases by 1 unit, students' intention to become professional accountant increase by 0.220 unit. Most of the students are expecting such a great job market demand after graduated due to job availability, besides getting more rewards such as higher salary and prestige as a professional accountant. The result supports Harnovinsah (2017), Jaffar et al. (2015), Bainbridge (2015), Ahmad et al. (2015) and Hutaibat (2012), but contradicts from Porter and Woolley (2014), Law and Yuen (2012) and Jackling and Calero (2006).

No such relationships are observed for subjective norms and self-efficacy, reveals that these two variables are not the determinants for students' intention to become professional accountants. The non-significance result for subjective norms is not in line with Ahmad et al. (2015), Suki et al. (2011) and Tan and Laswad (2006). Close individuals like family, friends and educators do not influence the students' intention to become professional accountants. In terms of self-efficacy, the result does not support Ahmad et al. (2015), Djatej et al. (2015) and Hayes and Credle (2008). The insignificant results may suggest that other persons and even their own confidence level does not inspire them to become professional accountant.

Test of significant difference

The second objective of the study is to examine whether there is a significant difference in students' intention to become professional accountants between the private and public university students. Additional tests are also performed to determine whether there is any significant difference in intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, subjective norms and self-efficacy between the two types of institutions.

The results in Table 05 shows that there is no significant difference in the students' intention to become professional accountants between the private and public university students (p>0.05), and it is contradicted from Hossain and Siddique (2012). Therefore, H2 is rejected. Perhaps, regardless of the types of institutions with different academic regulations and locations, it does not affect the students' career intention. Further tests are also conducted to determine whether any significant difference exists in intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, subjective norms and self-efficacy between the two types of institutions. The result indicates that only subjective norms is significantly differ between the private and public university students (p<0.05). However, no significant difference is found in intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and self-efficacy between the two types of institutions.