Attribution theory in the organizational sciences

Published on February 4, 2014   66 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Hi my name is Mark Martinko I'm a professor at the University of Queensland formally as Florida State University. I'm very excited to bring this material to you today. I've been working on this area for the past 30 years and I feel with the area has been a bit underappreciated. The psychologists have spent a lot of time working on attribution theory but organizational scientists have not, so what we're going to talk about today is the role of attribution theory place in organizational settings.
0:30
Did you ever wonder why people are so crazy or biased? Sometimes you just can't get over the differences opinion that people have. In the United States when I'm there I have my buttons on my radio, set to NPR or Fox which is conservative and liberal radio stations and if they're talking about the budget deficit, gun control, gay rights whatever they're talking about you'd have diametrically opposed views on the subject. Despite the fact that they have basically the same facts. In Australia where I'm at now, we have the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal National Coalition and they're not quite as polarized. But nonetheless they see things differently and wives and husbands, labor-management, landlords, tenants buyer, seller students, teachers often see things from a different perspective. We're going to talk about why that is.
1:25
The answer to why people see things differently at least in part is there attributions their beliefs about why they succeed and why they fail. If you fail some people will claim responsibility and say it was my fault, other people will blame other people and the external environment. Same way to success. Many people take credit for success and tend to blame other people for failure and so people have basic biases in terms of the way they look at things and the responsibility they take or in the blame they provide to other people. That is in a nutshell a lot of what we're going to be talking about today.

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Attribution theory in the organizational sciences

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