{"title":"The leadership fallacy: How misattribution of leadership leads to a blaming game","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/j.joep.2024.102753","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Assigning responsibility for a project’s success or failure is key to organizational performance, yet attribution fallacies often interfere. Our experimental study (<em>N</em>=339) shows team members mistakenly attribute too much influence to their leaders on task outcomes. Despite task outcomes being randomly determined by easy or hard difficulty rather than leadership, leaders received undue credit or blame. Leaders assessed their teams more negatively in difficult tasks, except for female leaders, who were more lenient in assessing both conditions than men. Leaders' self-assessments did not differ between experimental conditions, confirming their self-motivated evaluation; moreover completing an easy task boosted their confidence for harder challenges. Our study shows that attributional errors manifest differently in the evaluation of leaders and followers and demonstrates that success in simpler tasks can increase leaders' confidence, potentially leading to riskier behaviors.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48318,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Economic Psychology","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487024000618","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Assigning responsibility for a project’s success or failure is key to organizational performance, yet attribution fallacies often interfere. Our experimental study (N=339) shows team members mistakenly attribute too much influence to their leaders on task outcomes. Despite task outcomes being randomly determined by easy or hard difficulty rather than leadership, leaders received undue credit or blame. Leaders assessed their teams more negatively in difficult tasks, except for female leaders, who were more lenient in assessing both conditions than men. Leaders' self-assessments did not differ between experimental conditions, confirming their self-motivated evaluation; moreover completing an easy task boosted their confidence for harder challenges. Our study shows that attributional errors manifest differently in the evaluation of leaders and followers and demonstrates that success in simpler tasks can increase leaders' confidence, potentially leading to riskier behaviors.
期刊介绍：
The Journal aims to present research that will improve understanding of behavioral, in particular psychological, aspects of economic phenomena and processes. The Journal seeks to be a channel for the increased interest in using behavioral science methods for the study of economic behavior, and so to contribute to better solutions of societal problems, by stimulating new approaches and new theorizing about economic affairs. Economic psychology as a discipline studies the psychological mechanisms that underlie economic behavior. It deals with preferences, judgments, choices, economic interaction, and factors influencing these, as well as the consequences of judgements and decisions for economic processes and phenomena. This includes the impact of economic institutions upon human behavior and well-being. Studies in economic psychology may relate to different levels of aggregation, from the household and the individual consumer to the macro level of whole nations. Economic behavior in connection with inflation, unemployment, taxation, economic development, as well as consumer information and economic behavior in the market place are thus among the fields of interest. The journal also encourages submissions dealing with social interaction in economic contexts, like bargaining, negotiation, or group decision-making. The Journal of Economic Psychology contains: (a) novel reports of empirical (including: experimental) research on economic behavior; (b) replications studies; (c) assessments of the state of the art in economic psychology; (d) articles providing a theoretical perspective or a frame of reference for the study of economic behavior; (e) articles explaining the implications of theoretical developments for practical applications; (f) book reviews; (g) announcements of meetings, conferences and seminars.
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