Credit attribution bias and its impact on employee morale and retention

After 6 h, Mr X stood silent, applauding as the team leader was credited with all the success, while the team members had to be content with mere references. First impressions – reinforced by subsequent interactions with the supervisor – that an employee forms in the minds of the superiors leads to...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Strategic HR review 2019-04, Vol.18 (2), p.80-83
Main Authors: Goswami, Arijit, Pandey, Jatin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attribution theory
Bias
Communication
Employee attitude
Employee management relations
Halo effect
Meetings
Peers
Success
Supervisors
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:After 6 h, Mr X stood silent, applauding as the team leader was credited with all the success, while the team members had to be content with mere references. First impressions – reinforced by subsequent interactions with the supervisor – that an employee forms in the minds of the superiors leads to a credit attribution bias, which leads to repeated and continued acknowledgment and disproportionate allocation of benefits to one or two individuals in a team. Over time, this person is always pushed to interact with supervisors and steadily, he/she becomes the face of the team. [...]the person has higher visibility when it comes to communication between the team and the superiors. Over the course of time, whenever the team achieves something or delivers on its responsibilities successfully, the spotlight eventually falls on Y. The superior, owing to the bias that he bears in mind, associates the image of the team with Y. This leads to a glorified image of Y in the minds of the superior, which eventually gets communicated to the peers of the superior, resulting in increased glorification of Y (Figure 1).
ISSN:1475-4398
1758-8537
DOI:10.1108/SHR-04-2019-159