Facilitating internal audit quality and improving the performance of medical clinics

This article advances a new form of leadership-audit leadership-for cultivating internal audit quality in medical clinics. Twehe authors document the power of audit leadership, manifested by two facets-professional and relational behaviours-for developing a work environment in which people develop interpersonal trust and psychological safety, which is conducive for internal audit quality. The authors show how managers of medical clinics can shape a work environment in which internal audit is embraced and supported in ways that can help the units to perform at higher levels. Importantly, internal audit, often viewed as an unproductive organizational function, enables learning, process improvement and is a deterrence against potential transgressions. This article will be of particular interest to financial, accounting and management scholars, as well as professional auditors, managers, accountants and financial experts. This article provides a novel contribution to the literature of public sector organizations in general and healthcare organizations in particular. The authors explore the ways leaders help facilitate internal audit quality and drive work performance by employing a mixed-methods approach in which qualitative data was collected to construct a new concept-audit-enabling leadership-followed by time-lagged data collected from multiple respondents. The findings indicate that two facets-professional and relational behaviours- constitute audit-enabling leadership.