Ownership Structure And Performance Attribution Tendency Of Self-interest

The ownership structure reflects power status among contract bodies in thegovernance structure of listed companies. Different ownership structures determine thecontrol differences of different stakeholders. Power arrangements in different equitystructures have influence on the company’s accounting information provider—managementauthorities’ psychology and behavior, thus affecting the quality of accounting informationdisclosure and the accounting information user’s decision-making. At present, thegovernance structure of the listed company in our country is increasingly sound, and theshareholding system reform of the state-owned enterprise is constantly deepen, and theownership structure is increasingly diversified, but the "high equity concentration” and the“state final control” are still the most prominent characteristics. Therefore, equityconcentration and equity nature have always been the core aspects of ownership structureresearch in China.Continuous improvement of the quality of accounting information has became aneverlasting hot topic both in the theoretical and practical areas. Earnings management, as amethod of controlling or adjusting the accounting earnings information for enterprisemanagement authorities, has already became an important breakthrough of the accountinginformation quality study at home and abroad. Performance self-serving attribution,extending from the "impression management" theory in psychology, which refers to thebehavior that business enterprise management authorities manipulate and window-dresstheir own performance attribution, and also gradually be introduced in the study ofaccounting information disclosure quality. The application of both earnings managementand performance self-serving attribution is to lead the accounting information users tomake economic decisions which more accord with company managements’ interestorientation. The former is aimed at data information management, which is easy toquantify and supervise, while the latter is manipulating on language information and hasthe stronger subjectivity and concealment.This research adopts content analysis method and takes annual reports of listedcompanies in China as samples. Applying SPSS statistical software, the study has firstlycarried out an empirical research on the existence of the self-serving attribution tendencyof both the good-performance companies and the poor-performance companies, and theSSAB of the latter is more significant. Then based on the research, taking self-servingattribution bias as dependent variable and selecting both equity concentration and equitynature as independent variables, the paper has done some theoretical and empirical analysis in detail about the relationship between the equity structure and performance self-servingattribution bias.According to an empirical research of the relationship between equity concentrationand performance self-serving attribution bias, relevant conclusions are as follows: whenthe equity concentration is low, the companies’ self-serving attribution tendency is mostapparent; among the state-owned enterprises, compared with the managements in the listedcompanies with relatively concentrated, those in the companies with high equityconcentration have more obvious tendency on language information manipulation;however, among the non-SOEs, the management in the highly concentrated equitycompanies have more convergent self-serving attribution tendency than those in therelatively concentrated equity companies.By the empirical research of the relationship between equity nature and performanceself-serving attribution bias, relevant conclusions are as follows: among the highlyconcentrated equity listed companies, there is stronger self-serving attribution motivationand power with the management in the state-owned enterprises than that in the non-SOEs,but the differences are not quite obvious. Furthermore, there isn’t obvious difference on thetendency of accounting information disclosure self-serving attribution both in thestate-owned enterprises and non-SOEs, whether in the diffuse ownership companies or inthe relatively concentrated ownership companies.In comparison with the existing research, the innovation of this study is that thisresearch is based on the two core problems in equity structure——equity concentrationand equity nature. Then, under the interaction of the two equity structure dimensions, thedifferences of the self-serving attribution tendency of our country’s listed companymanagement performance are discussed and demonstrated.