Attributional statements in annual report narratives: the justification of organizational performance

n this paper the nature of organizational discourse is theoretically underpinned by the concept of self-serving attributions, a type of causal reasoning that allows the writer to take credit for good news and avoid blame for bad news. Based on motivational and informational explanations, we incorporate signaling theory in order to develop hypotheses for the expected levels of self-serving attributions in the justification of organizational performance. A sample with 49 companies was selected, both from a bad year and a good year regarding the capital market context. Each company?s Letter to Shareholders was content analyzed in order to test our propositions about the roles of different combinations of performance and contextual factors as triggers of self-serving attributions. The results corroborate the theoretical hypotheses advanced, but the sample size is an issue regarding robustness.