Internal Credit and External Blame: Self-Attribution in Operations and Supply Chain Performance

Problem definition: This study examines self-attribution tendencies and their associated outcomes in operations management (OM) performance evaluation in which managers are not always objective when giving credit to outcomes. They may attribute strong performance to internal factors (internal credit), assigning poor performance to external factors (external blame). Methodology/results: Large language models (LLMs) based on LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct are fine-tuned to analyze earnings call question-and-answer (Q&A) transcripts and construct a firm-level measure of OM self-attribution. The superiority of an LLM’s performance is validated against traditional natural language processing approaches (gradient boosting, k-nearest neighbors, and random forest) and alternative LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o). The LLM-based measures are then used in multinomial logit models and fixed-effect models to assess the existence of self-attribution and its associations with subsequent outcomes. Empirical analysis reveals a consistent pattern of OM self-attribution: managers claim internal credit for intraorganizational actions, assigning external blame to supply chain partners or macroeconomic conditions. This pattern persists after controlling for managers’ experience, Q&A sequencing, leading questions, contextual factors, and uncertainty in LLM outputs. OM self-attribution is more prevalent among larger firms, firms led by more experienced managers, and firms with lower operational efficiency and supply chain risk. Whereas non-OM financial self-attribution is documented as a psychological bias, OM self-attribution exhibits a distinctive diplomatic and constructive nature. In contrast to the temporary effect of non-OM financial self-attribution, OM self-attribution is associated with real changes to financial and operational outcomes. Firms with stronger OM self-attribution tendencies receive more positive market and media responses and tend to have better future positioning in production and demand management and supply chain optimization. Managerial implications: This study complements existing work on financial self-attribution by identifying a unique pattern of self-attribution in the OM context that functions as a strategic illusion of managerial control. OM self-attribution can be interpreted as a strategy by which managers strategically shape attributions to signal active engagement in an uncertain environment, ultimately associated with positive future firm performance.

History: This paper was selected as part of the 1RR initiative between the M&SOM journal and the MSOM Society. This paper was part of the 2025 MSOM Interface of Finance, Operations and Risk Management (iFORM) SIG Conference.

Funding: This work was supported by the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee (Hong Kong) [Grant 14505325], TKI Dinalog Dutch Institute for Advanced Logistics [Grant 35503010], and National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72342026].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2025.0548.