It’s quite funny we all do it unknowingly. Our deeds are due to our own traits, capabilities and hard work wherein others achievements are because of external factors and hardly due their own hard work. This leads to an attitude of belittling others efforts and over exaggerating ours. As a leader or team managers it’s a big pit fall which one should avoid.
Attribution refers to our mental simplification for understanding the causes of an event. Generally it can be divided along two opposing dimensions internal (own traits and strengths) vs external(environmental or luck) and stable (innate or permanently acquired ) vs unstable (circumstantial).
It’s astonishing to notice that whenever we are looking at things or events from me vs others lenses we have attribution biases invariably. This prevents us from truly recognizing the efforts and hard work of others and over exaggerating our own efforts. We minimize the contribution of other factors in our success however once the depression settles in the same gets reversed and we start thinking the opposite.
Due to these attribution biases reality gets marred and the true appreciation of facts and people don’t surface. For example
I passed college exams with flying marks due to hard work but failed in competitive exams due to bad luck.
Vs
Oh in college exam he got lucky but reality came in open during competitive exams.
Such predispositions are the biggest hurdles in true leadership and self serving biases keep a person from real underlying factors in successes and failures. If we keep just world scenario in mind (where it’s assumed that this is a just & fair world and people get what they deserve) we know more about our own successes or failures and reasons thereof, however for others we only know partial facts and thus assume remaining as per our own biases.
Attribution, if done with fair mindset, without bias do gives us a very clear and quick understanding of the situation and help to draw conclusions pretty fairly. According to Jones and Davis internal attributions provides information through which we can make assumptions and pass through 5 filters
Was there a choice?
Was it accidental or intentional?
Was it socially desirable?
Was it hedonistic or self serving?
Was it seeking an impact on others?
Now a just and fair attribution by leader is of utmost importance as it determines the team motivation, level of appreciation and also serves as guidepost for the leader to act as coach. Their ability to keep these biases away is what distinguishes a great leader from a good one. Leader has to process the available information and even gather in depth data of a certain behavior or impact based on it’s distinctiveness(given the same situation if the same behavior will re occur), consistency ( same behavior over period of time) and majority performance (in the team or similar set of employees over period of time) . At times finding cause and effect just to make social sense is very dangerous as there might be no causality between the even and the factors considered as causes for the action.
We as leaders have greater responsibility to understand the team and praise and reprimand them to coach and care about them to lead to organizational success and induce team cohesiveness.
Leadership Insights 