Chapter 2: Opportunities as Attributions: The Enterprise-Serving Bias

The nature of opportunity is explored through an attributional analysis of written statements offered by 1,686 owner/managers to these two questions: (1) What is the biggest opportunity facing your business? (2) What is the biggest problem facing your business? Results from the analyses indicate that owner/managers’ descriptions of opportunities were, in attributional terms, most likely to be external and stable. As for problems, the first accounts given by owner/managers were most likely to be external and variable.

We posit that there is a certain “self-serving” quality to the consensus attributional pattern of viewing opportunities as external and stable and problems as external and variable. This view of the world is not self-serving in the usual sense that the term has been used previously in the social psychological literature. There, “self-serving” refers to internal attributions for success and external attributions for failure. The important difference is that both in conceptual terms and in the way the terms have been empirically tested, “success” and “failure” are both in the past. They are accounts offered after the outcome of behavior is known. In our research, opportunities and problems are in the future, at least to the extent that an individual might hope to deal with them. The owner/manager’s world is filled with things to do _ opportunities to exploit, problems to solve. So the “self-serving” view, which we prefer to call “enterprise-serving,” is to believe that both are external. That is: “One will be there when I want it (opportunity) and the other will go away when I can fix it (problem).” We believe that the attributional framework, which allows us to characterize both opportunities and problems as enterprise serving, may make important future contributions to our understanding of the way in which owner/managers think about the world facing their businesses.