Self-serving tendencies in retrospective reasoning in accounting narratives: does a capital market environment matter?

Studies of verbal behaviour in the context of financial accounting narratives have evidenced selfpresentational tendencies in corporate framing activities. Different authors demonstrated the tendency to attribute positive effects or outcomes to the company’s own actions or corporate origins (company strategy, decisions, know how, human resources potential, etc.) and negative outcomes to external events or chance factors (business climate, inflation, market prices, government policy, weather). This explanation pattern is considered as self-serving as it leads to define situations to the company’s own advantage. In organizational research verbal impression management and related self-serving tendencies are seen as purposive, goal-directed behaviour. This type of research typically relies on a motivational explanation of such behaviour. Also studies of self-serving tendencies within the context of accounting narratives are generally set within a capital market environment were motivational factors for purposeful image management are strong. However, attributional biases could be the result of informational processes (the subjective salience of an interpretive context) rather than of impression management processes, i.e. the result of the fact that people usually intend or expect to be successful (on the basis of prior experience or prior cognitive beliefs) with their actions (the results of which they report on) rather than being motivated by the desire to construct a positive (or non-negative) image of the personal involvement in the outcomes commented on. In this paper we treat a capital market context as a pivotal variable to discern situations of strong and weak motivational influences and contrast the selfserving reasoning tendencies in public and private companies, the central assumption being, that when a motivational explanation prevails significant differences in self-serving patterns should be revealed. A second purpose of the paper is to explore the impact of the nature of the effect explained on the selfserving tendencies. Previous research has only taken into account the (positive or negative) evaluative character of the explained effect, but has ignored other content characteristics of the explained effect. Our research reveals that the self-serving character of the explanation strongly depends on the nature of the accounting effect explained with ramifications on the public/private dichotomy.