Advances in Natural and Applied Sciences, 8(2) February 2014, Pages: 56-64 AENSI Journals Advances in Natural and Applied Sciences ISSN:1995-0772 EISSN: 1998-1090 Journal home page: www.aensiweb.com/anas/index.html Corresponding Author: Nurhidayah Yahya, Accounting Faculty, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. Auditor’s Participation In Time Budget Setting Towards Perceived Time Budget Attainability And Job Satisfaction Nurhidayah Yahya and Nor Balkish Zakaria Accounting Faculty, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Received 17 January 2014 Received in revised form 18 March 2014 Accepted 22 March 2013 Available online 10 April 2014 Key words: Participation in time budget setting, perceived time budget attainability, job satisfaction. This study examines the time budget environment of auditors‟ participation. Based on questionnaires distributed among the Malaysian auditors in Big Four audit firm headquarters, this study found that the direction of the auditors‟ participation in setting the time budget and the auditors‟ perception of the time budget attainability are positive in direction. Further, auditors‟ job satisfaction which is measured as the outcome also shows a positive relationship with the perceived time budget attainability. © 2014 AENSI Publisher All rights reserved. To Cite This Article: Nurhidayah Yahya and Nor Balkish Zakaria., Auditor‟s Participation In Time Budget Setting Towards Perceived Time Budget Attainability And Job Satisfaction. Adv. in Nat. Appl. Sci., 8(2): 56-64, 2014 INTRODUCTION The time budget is one of the very important key in an audit assignment. Auditors generally perceive that their performance evaluation and career advancement in an audit firm are strongly related to their ability to complete an audit assignment on time rather than to be based on the quality of audit performed [48,33]. Several factors need to be considered in order to attain the time budget. These factors are usually triggered by the time budget environment which is known as the stressors. Examples of stressors are workloads, relationships, career development, managerial responsibility, personal responsibility, home demands, and daily hassles [49]. McNamara and Liyanarachchi [33] also identified some of the time budget environments which include the clients‟ fee, audit programs, the previous year time budget and auditors‟ participation. Greater participation in budget-setting also has a positive association with motivation [10]. Hence, the auditors should participate in setting their time budget. Stressor in the audit environment will lead to several outcomes; one of them is job (dis)satisfaction. Employees‟ job dissatisfaction, turnover and poor data for future planning and controls usually associated with time budget pressure [12]. Unsatisfied workers could lead to high turnover which would be costly for the firm as their resources are reduced and they have to train new workers to do the job. As the pressure of time budget may burdensome the auditors, job dissatisfaction may arise. The continuous effects of the time budget tightness will then contribute and affect the auditors‟ job dissatisfaction level and vice versa. This study focuses on the outcome on the auditors themselves which is the job satisfaction arising from the perceived time budget attainability. As the study contributes to the existing literature in this area it also extends the literature of the connection between stressors of the time budget participation with general job satisfaction literature. The auditors‟ satisfaction towards their jobs in presence of the pressure of time budget is measured empirically. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: section 2 reviews prior literature and development of hypotheses are then described. Section 3, presents the research method. Section 4 provides the results and Section 5 concludes the paper. Literature Review: Several studies have shown the existence of pressures in the audit atmosphere [36,1,9,40,4,22]. For example, the pressure with the clients could be in terms of the clients‟ size, clients‟ financial health and the competition, which may lead to the pressure to retain the clients [46]. The outcomes of stress may include absenteeism, turnover, job performance, job satisfaction, organisational commitment, professional commitment, low morale, reduced productivity and turnover intentions [5,20]. Thus auditors‟ job satisfaction (outcome) may