Beyond the Paycheck: How Financial Reward and Work Environment Shape Accounting Students' Career Choice as Public Accountants

Abstrak

Purpose: This study aims to examine and empirically test the effect of financial reward on accounting students' career choice with respect to the public accounting profession, and to determine whether a work environment moderates that relationship or instead operates as its own, independent predictor of career choice.

Method: A quantitative explanatory design was applied. Using a purposive sampling technique, 159 active accounting students at a public university in Surabaya, Indonesia, who had completed introductory auditing coursework, were surveyed with a structured seven-point Likert questionnaire covering financial reward, work environment, and career choice. The hypothesized relationships were tested with a three step hierarchical moderated regression analysis, using mean-centered predictors for the interaction term, after item validity, reliability, normality, and classical assumption tests.

Findings: All fifteen questionnaire items were valid and the three research instruments were highly reliable, the regression residuals were normally distributed, and the final model showed no problematic multicollinearity or heteroscedasticity. Financial reward had a significant, positive effect on career choice, confirming Hypothesis H1. The interaction between financial reward and work environment was not statistically significant, so Hypothesis H2 was not supported; applying the Sharma, Durand, and Gur-Arie typology of moderator variables reclassified work environment as an independent predictor variable of career choice rather than a moderator, since it carried its own significant, positive direct effect on career choice while remaining essentially uncorrelated with financial reward.

Implications: Public accounting firms and accounting educators should treat financial reward communication and work environment communication as two separate, additive value propositions rather than assuming that strengthening one will automatically make the other more persuasive to prospective entrants, since both levers were independently and significantly associated with stronger career choice outcomes in this sample.

Originality: The originality of this study lies in formally testing, rather than assuming, the statistical role of work environment in the financial reward to career choice relationship among Indonesian accounting students, applying a mean centered hierarchical moderated regression design together with an established moderator typology, and updating the theoretical discussion with recent Scopus and Web of Science indexed evidence on total rewards, work environment, and career decision making.