Role Attribution Theory Plays in How Perceptions About Others Are Formed in the Workplace
Anyone who has ever worked in an organizational setting can readily attest to the need to understand others in order to facilitate personal interactions and achieve optimal job performance. Attribution theory holds that people tend to develop perceptions about others based on their empirical observations which are then used, consciously or subconsciously, to form perceptions about their behaviors. In some ways, this process of applying attribution theory is intuitive and ongoing but there are some aspects of attribution theory that require explanation in order to better understand how and why people are motivated in this fashion. To this end, this paper reviews the relevant peer-reviewed and scholarly literature in order to evaluate the role attribution theory plays in how perceptions about others are formed in the workplace. Finally, a summary of the research and important findings about attribution theory are presented in the conclusion.
Review and Analysis
Introduced in the mid-1940s (Cabanis & Pyka, 2013) and refined in the late 1950s by Fritz Heider (Sirin & Villalobus, 2011), attribution theory has been the focus of a growing body of scholarship and some authorities argue that it has transcended the theoretical stage to become a legitimate field of study (Gaier, 2015). In sum, attribution theory maintains that people attempt to make sense out of the workplace by assigning causality to the behaviors of their coworkers, and such attributions tend to affect perceptions of their behaviors in the future (Zamani & Giaglis, 2015). Attribution theory is based on the so-called "theory of mind," a term that is used to describe the awareness humans have of the existence of minds in other people and how to explain and interpret their thought processes as well as their own (Herman, 2011).
There are two basic assumptions involved with attribution theory that account for this process as follows: (a) people want and need to make sense of their environment as well as themselves; and (b) people are motivated to better understand the reasons behind the behaviors of others as well as their own behaviors (Gaiter, 2015). In addition, attribution theory also includes the adaptational implications of these interpretations about the behaviors of other (Tasman & Kay, 2008). In most cases, people tend to apply attribution theory to observed behaviors by asking "Why?" and then developing the most logical answer as the reason (Chadee, 2011).
Interestingly, some authorities maintain that the tenets of attribution theory are operative irrespective of whether people are aware of it or not. In this regard, Christian (2009) reports that:
The fundamental attribution theory, greatly simplified, says that we tend to 'blame' someone's behavior on internal factors (their disposition, their personality) rather than external factors (their circumstances, the unique situation). This theory is among a handful of cognitive biases that affect our thinking whether we realize it or not. (p. 28)
The foregoing means that people tend to apply attribution theory in the workplace to account for the behaviors of others and to formulate perceptions concerning how they can reasonably be expected to behave in the future, especially under similar circumstances (Christian, 2009). Likewise, attribution theory holds that people tend to make these sorts of observations and interpretations in an effort to gain more control over their environment (Cagney, 2012).
Although all humans tend to apply the tenets of attribution theory to explain and understand the behaviors of others in the workplace, the process can have severe consequences when attribution errors are allowed to interfere with the accurate interpretation of observed behaviors, particularly when they are made by supervisors (Cagney, 2012). Conversely, employees may tend to explain and interpret the behaviors of their supervisors based on incomplete information in ways that detract from the quality of their relationships with them, further eroding employee morale and job performance. Therefore, it is vitally important to better understand just how automatically people tend to use attribution theory in an effort to make sense of their workplace environment and the limitations that the process entails.
A risk exists, though, that observed behaviors may be misinterpreted in ways that overlook the true motivation behind such behaviors. For example, someone might observe a co-worker unaccountably swerve his car in the parking lot and almost hit another vehicle and attribute this behavior to the co-worker being a poor or inattentive driver. What the observer did not see, though, was the stray dog n the parking lot that the co-worker swerved to avoid hitting (Christian, 2009). Similarly, a supervisor surreptitiously observes a subordinate appear to not be working because...
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