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Causal Attribution Theory
Attributions are causal explanations. Examples of causal explanations include effort, ability, the situation, and luck. The fundamental premise of attribution theory is that people’s beliefs (i.e., attributions) about the causes of significant outcomes (e.g., successes and failures) affect their expectations for success, their emotions, and their behaviors. Thus, a student who believes she failed a test because of a lack of ability is likely to expect to fail in the future, feel bad about her performance, and is less likely to study in the future. Attributions are fundamental cognitive processes that affect a wide range of organizational behaviors. Almost all organizational researchers would agree that the reward structures of organizations are critical to the successes and failures of individuals as well as to the success of organizations as a whole. Therefore, attributions about the causes of individual as well as organizational success and failure are critical because they affect the expectations, emotions, and behaviors of organizational members. As will be discussed below, attribution processes are integral to understanding a wide range of organizational phenomena such as leader– member relations, entitlement perceptions, perceptions of abusive supervision, and counterproductive behaviors. The following sections of this entry contain discussions on the theoretical development of attribution theory, basic concepts, research findings, criticisms, and the future of attribution theory in the organizational sciences.
Fundamentals
The origins of attribution theory can be traced back to the work of Fritz Heider, who likened people to naive psychologists, trying to figure out the causes of their outcomes (e.g., successes and failures) as well as the causes of other people’s outcomes (social attributions). According to Heider, understanding the dynamics of causation enables individuals to be efficacious in their interactions with other people and the environment. When individuals understand why they are successful, they know what to expect and how to repeat their successes. On the other hand, understanding the causes of failure enables individuals to avoid future failures.
Following the work of Heider, the two most noted contributors to attribution theory are Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. Kelley worked on the front end of the attribution process and described how individuals combine different types of information (consensus, consistency, and distinctive-ness) to make social attributions about the causes of people’s behaviors. Consensus information is the result of comparing a person’s performance with the performances of others. Consistency information is within-person information and is concerned with the stability of the performance. Distinctiveness is concerned with the interaction between the person’s performance and the situation. Kelley described how the combination of these three sources of information allows observers to attribute a behavior to the person, the situation, or the entity (i.e., the interaction between the person and the situation). Thus, for example, the cause is attributed to the person when consensus is low, consistency is high, and distinctiveness is low.
Weiner focused on describing, explaining, and validating how attributional explanations (e.g., ability and luck) and their dimensions (e.g., internal and unstable) affect the expectancies, emotions, and behaviors of individuals. This early theoretical work as well as the empirical work was grounded in the field of social psychology.
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