Devising a conceptual model to illustrate accountants' career success through the implementation of a fuzzy cognitive mapping approach

The purpose of this research is to provide a local model of an accountant’s career success. This research is applied in terms of the goal, and a descriptive-exploratory and mixed research in terms of data collection. The research method is conducted in four steps, the first step is carried out based on qualitative content analysis and reliability method in order to measure the validity. Achieving the initial conceptual structure of accountants’ career success factors is the result obtained from this step. In the second step, the obtained influential factors are verified two steps based on the Fuzzy Delphi method by the experts. The statistical population in this step consists of 8 members of scientific-practical experts including professional and trained auditors and accountants and university professors selected based on theoretical sampling, utilization of targeted (judgmental) and snowball techniques. Subsequently, in the third step, experts’ subjective models are extracted and analyzed based on the fuzzy cognitive mapping method, and the type of relationship and the intensity of accountants’ career success factors are verified by 22 experts. Next, several scenarios are simulated in order to improve the factors and their role in devising the model. The utilized software to implement fuzzy cognitive mapping is FCMAPPER. Moreover, in the fourth step, the dynamic model of accountants’ career success factors is devised and extracted by using social media analytics and UCINET software. based on the analysis of the represented comments, the generality of the model consists of 21 factors of indication, modeling, and verification. the final model indicated career success as a function of important models such as work environment, knowledge, and emotional quotient (EQ) which is guided towards individual, social, and organizational outcomes with the involvement of financial factors and organizational climate, family, and university backgrounding with the support of operational solutions and techniques.