Page 227 - DMGT402_MANAGEMENT_PRACTICES_AND_ORGANIZATIONAL_BEHAVIOUR

Management Practices and Organisational Behaviour

Notes 2. External Attributions: Attributions can be made to an external source of responsibility.
That means something outside the individuals' control. For example, suppose you perform
well in your MBA examination you might say the examination was easy or that you had
good luck. In this case, you are attributing your performance to sources beyond your
control or external attributions.

Case Study Managers Explain what has helped and Hindered
their Advancement
I ndustry Week magazine surveyed 1,300 middle mangers in medium-sized and large
companies with at least 500 employees on a number of issues.

Two questions were particularly relevant because they address attribution issues: To what
do you attribute your success to date? And what do you think has most hampered your
advancement to even higher levels in your company?
Most managers attributed their advancement to their knowledge and on-the-job
accomplishments. More than 80 per cent of these middle managers ranked these as being
the biggest factors in their promotion into management.
When asked what most hindered their advancement to even higher levels of management,
56 percent of the managers said it was because they hadn’t built relationships with the
“right” people. This was followed by 23 percent saying that they were most hindered by
insufficient education, intelligence, or knowledge of their business area.
These results are exactly what you’d expect based on attribution theory.
Specifically, consistent with the self-serving bias, these managers attributed their success
to internal factors (their knowledge and on-the-job accomplishments) and placed the
blame for their failures on external factors (the implied politics in knowing the right
people).
Questions
1. What do you analyze as the main reasons to attribute to higher growth in an
organisation?
2. Do you think that your relationship with "right people" determines how far you
have to go in your career or is it your performance?

Source: D.R. Altany, “Torn Between Halo and Horns,” Industry Week (March 15, 1993), page 19.

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