Management and Development Process

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The reasons we assign for people's behavior affect our responses toward them. Compared with other job holders, managers are more concerned with examining reasons for behaviors of other people. In fact, the need to explain behavior is likely to be particularly strong for managers, since part of their job involves evaluating their employees' performance. Factors affecting our understanding of behavior have been addressed by a branch of social psychology called attribution theory. Attribution theorists have noted that there is a large number of factors that affect the reasons we assign for people's behavior. A manager tends to assume that subordinates' behavior is a result of either their personality characteristics or of external situational charcteristics. For example, a manager who is concerned about determining the reasons for the behavior of an employee may observe several employees working in jobs similar to that employee's, or watch that employee working on a variety of jobs over a long period of time. Harold Kelley (1973) has suggested that when opportunities such as these are available, we try to determine whether other people behave the same way as the person whose behavior we are trying to understand, and whether the person's behavior is consistent across a variety of situations and time periods. thus, if al employees performing one particular job behave the same way as the observed employee does, and if the employee's behavior is different when he or she is performing different jobs, the manager is likely to attribute differences in behavior to the situation, in this case the job. But if the employee's behavior is both different from that of the employees and consistent when performing different jobs, the manager is likely to attribute the behavior to the employee's personality. Edward Jones and Robert Nisbett (1971) have concluded that when we observe someone else's behavior, we tend to underestimate situational influences and overestimate the influence of personality traits. But when the situation is reversed and we are trying to find reasons for our own behavior, we tend to overestimate the importance of the situation and underestimate the importance of our own personality than do observers and actors and observers tend to notice different aspects of behavior. The tendency for a manager (observer) to attribute an employee's (actor) behavior to his personality depends, in part, on the relationship beteween the manager and the employees. Edward Jones and Davis (1962) have identified additional factors which increase the likelihood that managers will attribute behavior to personality charactreristics. These include the appropriateness of behavior to the situation and the observer's belief that the behavior was meant to affect him or her. The tendency to attribute our own behavior to situational causes and others' behavior to personality characteristics is common in organizations. Jogo and Vroom (1975) interpreted the results of their research as suggesting that the subordinates saw their managager's decision styles as reflecting the manager's personalitis, but their own decision styles as affected more by the situation. Managers are usually likely to attribute employee's successes to personality traits such as effort and ability, and failures to external factors such as the difficulty of the task (Kelley & Michela, 1980). When problems occur in an organization, it is typically easier for a mangager to assume that a subordinate is responsible for them than to explore the possibility that the problems are due to complex external factors such as an inappropriate organizational structure or design of jobs. In brief, it appears that when no evaluation of success or failure is involved, managers and employees are both likely to attribute their own behavior to external factors and others' behavior to personality dispositions. Most of the attributional processes managers and their subordinates employ are not fully thought out: neither managers nor their subordinates are likely to be fully aware of the processes they are using to determine causes of their own and others' behavior.

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