The Impact of Auditors' Existential Critical Thinking, Production of Personal Meaning, Transcendental Awareness and Expansion of Self-awareness on the Development of the Theory of Intellectual Capital

The present research was conducted with the aim of studying, analyzing and modeling the role of psychological components of existential critical thinking, personal meaning generation, transcendental awareness and expansion of self-awareness on intellectual capital. The psychological components of existential critical thinking, personal meaning generation, transcendental awareness, and self-awareness development, may, through interaction with other variables, affect auditors' intellectual capital. This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive survey in terms of data collection method. The statistical population of the research includes all auditors working in audit institutions and audit organizations in Iran during the year 2021, 319 people were randomly selected as a sample based on Cochran's formula. A standard questionnaire with a 5-level Likert scale was used to collect data. The analysis of the collected data as well as the testing of the hypotheses was done in the form of descriptive analysis and inferential statistics using SPSS26 and SmartPLS3 software by applying the new generation of SEM using PLS method. The results showed that the psychological components of existential critical thinking, production of personal meaning, transcendental awareness and expansion of self-awareness have a positive and significant effect on intellectual capital. The results of this research are a novel turning point for increasing attention and development of acquired skills training related to the those psychological components among auditors, which can lead to a great increase in intellectual capital in the auditing profession.