East-west differences in attributions for company performance: A content analysis of Japanese and US corporate annual reports

Prior cross-cultural studies indicate that the self-serving attributional bias is more prevalent in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures. There is, however, a dearth of research looking into cross-cultural differences in attributional patterns that is based on publicly available archival data. This study tries to fill that lacuna. It reports the results based on a content analysis of corporate annual reports from U. S. and Japanese companies. The results reported in this study demonstrate that cross-cultural differences found in experimental settings are not necessarily observed in naturalistic settings. Specifically, this study reveals that both U. S. as well as Japanese companies explain company results in a self-serving fashion. Overall, the results support the notion that the nature of the relationship affects the extent to which cross-cultural differences in attributional patterns emerge.