Fighting Fear with Frequency: Accounting Majors and Oral Communication

Communication skills development among accounting students has benefited from accounting practitioners’ input as well as research from communication and allied fields such as psychology. McCroskey’s Personal Report of Communication Anxiety (PRCA) has been used to show that accounting students have been perceived as more anxious about communicating than other undergraduates. A review of studies shows that these differences are not statistically significant. A business major alumni study (Marcel 2014) identified a distinct variable correlated to greater confidence in presenting, namely frequency of making presentations, which has not been studied in undergraduates. The current survey of 259 undergraduate accounting and business majors revealed significantly lower communication anxiety than McCroskey’s mean scores for college students, as well as nearly every study using the PRCA conducted on accounting majors since 1990. These results correlate to frequent presenting in class, extracurricular settings and work/internships, and higher family incomes. Women derived more benefit from frequently presenting than men.