The impact of implicit theories of personality malleability on opportunistic financial reporting

Naman Desai, Shailendra Pratap Jain, Shalini Jain and Arindam Tripathy

Journal of Business Research, 2020, vol. 116, issue C, 258-265

Abstract: Individuals typically believe that a highly valued personal attribute is a non-malleable trait-like entity (entity theory), or that the attribute is malleable and can be changed and developed (incremental theory). Research suggests that entity theorists perceive existing norms, regulations, and moral orders to be more rigid, whereas incremental theorists assess morality in terms of broad principles that shape world views. We argue that these differences in traits would increase incremental theorists’ propensity to act opportunistically as compared to entity theorists. The results of our experiments confirm these expectations and indicate that business pressures are an overarching driver of opportunistic financial reporting. This result suggests that while pressures and personal attributes do interact to drive opportunistic behavior, if individuals are put under pressure, they are likely to act opportunistically irrespective of their personal attributes. Additionally, our results also indicate that mindsets are a stable predictor of opportunistic behavior across different contexts.

Keywords: Mindsets; Entity theory; Incremental theory; Opportunistic financial reporting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296320303465
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:116:y:2020:i:c:p:258-265

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.05.043

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().