ATTRIBUTION THEORY– HOW WE MAKE JUDGEMENTS ABOUT PEOPLE

The ways in which we perceive and make judgements about people at work are explained by attribution theory, which concerns the assignment of causes to events. We make an attribution when we perceive and describe other people’s actions and try to discover why they behaved in the way they did. We can also make attributions about our own behaviour. Heider (1958) has pointed out that: ‘In everyday life we form ideas about other people and about social situations. We interpret other people’s actions and we predict what they will do under certain circumstances.’

In attributing causes to people’s actions we distinguish between what is in the person’s power to achieve and the effect of environmental influence. A personal cause, whether someone does well or badly, may, for example, be the amount of effort displayed, while a situational cause may be the extreme difficulty of the task. Kelley (1967) has suggested that there are four criteria that we apply to decide whether behaviour is attributable to personal rather than external (situational) causes:

● distinctiveness – the behaviour can be distinguished from the behaviour of other people in similar situations; 

● consensus– if other people agree that the behaviour is governed by some personal characteristic; 

● consistency over time – whether the behaviour is repeated; 

● consistency over modality(ie the manner in which things are done) – whether or not the behaviour is repeated in different situations.

Attribution theory is also concerned with the way in which people attribute success or failure to themselves. Research by Weiner (1974) and others has indicated that when people with high achievement needs have been successful, they ascribe this to internal factors such as ability and effort. High achievers tend to attribute failure to lack of effort and not lack of ability. Low achievers tend not to link success with effort but to ascribe their failures to lack of ability.