Abstract
Employees’ affective responses to their work have increasingly been linked to their subjective well-being and their quality of life (QOL) overall. One source of subjective well-being for individuals is the credit they receive for organizational successes and the blame they receive for failures. This chapter presents two ethical dilemmas involving blame and credit attributions. In determining how to address these dilemmas, we review the research literature on responsibility assignments, integrate recent research on blame contagion, describe how this process can affect employees’ willingness to take risks and report errors, and examines how these processes can impact an organization’s capacity to learn. We finally integrate these findings in a model of blame assignment in organizations, proposing structural and cultural interventions that may help to address some of the problematic outcomes of blame and credit attributions for QWL.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Aquino, K., Tripp, T. M., & Bies, R. J. (2001). How employees respond to personal offense: The effects of blame attribution, victim status, and offender status on revenge and reconciliation in the workplace. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(1), 52–59.
Arvey, R. D., & Ivancevich, J. M. (1980). Punishment in organizations: A review, propositions, and research suggestions. The Academy of Management Review, 5(1), 123–132.
Barsade, S. G. (2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644–675.
Barsade, S. G., & Gibson, D. E. (2007). Why does affect matter in organizations? Academy of Management Perspectives, 21(1), 36–59.
Baumeister, R. F., Chesner, S. P., Senders, P. S., & Tice, D. M. (1988). Who’s in charge here? Group leaders do lend help in emergencies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 14(1), 17–22.
Bell, N., & Tetlock, P. (1989). The intuitive politician and the assignment of blame in organizations. In R. A. Giacalone & P. Rosenfeld (Eds.), Impression management in the organization (pp. 105–124). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bellandi, T., Albolino, S., & Tomassini, C. R. (2007). How to create a safety culture in the healthcare system: The experience of the Tuscany Region. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 8(5), 495–507.
Bettman, J. R., & Weitz, B. A. (1983). Attributions in the board room: Causal reasoning in corporate annual reports. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28(2), 165–183.
Bies, R. J., & Tripp, T. M. (2000). A passion for justice: The rationality and morality of revenge. In R. Cropanzano (Ed.), Justice in the workplace (Vol. 2, pp. 197–208). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Bradfield, M., & Aquino, K. (1999). The effects of blame attributions and offender likeableness on forgiveness and revenge in the workplace. Journal of Management, 25(5), 607–631.
Bradley, G. W. (1978). Self-serving biases in the attribution process: A reexamination of the fact or fiction question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(1), 56–71.
Brown, K. A., & Mitchell, T. R. (1986). Influence of task interdependence and number of poor performers on diagnoses of causes of poor performance. The Academy of Management Journal, 29(2), 412–424.
Bruno, M. (2010, May 7). Accident expert weighs in on Gulf oil spill. Grist. Retrieved June 1, 2010, from http://www.grist.org
Campbell, A. C., Converse, P. E., & Rodgers, W. L. (1976). The quality of American life. New York: Russell Sage.
Catino, M. (2008). A review of literature: Individual blame vs. organizational function logics in accident analysis. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 16(1), 53–62.
Catino, M. (2009). Blame culture and defensive medicine. Cognition, Technology & Work, 11(4), 245–253.
Crant, J. M., & Bateman, T. S. (1993). Assignment of credit and blame for performance outcomes. The Academy of Management Journal, 36, 7–27.
Darley, J. M., & Latane, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4, Pt. 1), 377–383.
Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., & Smith, H. L. (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 276–302.
Dugan, K. W. (1989). Ability and effort attributions: Do they affect how managers communicate performance feedback information? The Academy of Management Journal, 32(1), 87–114.
Earley, P. C. (1989). Social loafing and collectivism: A comparison of the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Administrative Science Quarterly, 34(4), 565–581.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Edmondson, A. C. (1996). Learning from mistakes is easier said than done: Group and organizational influences on the detection and correction of human error. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 32(1), 5–28.
Ehrich, K. (2006). Telling cultures: ‘Cultural’ issues for staff reporting concerns about colleagues in the UK National Health Service. Sociology of Health & Illness, 28(7), 903–926.
Fast, N. J., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2010). Blame contagion: The automatic transmission of self-serving attributions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(1), 97–106.
Fincham, F. D., & Roberts, C. (1985). Intervening causation and the mitigation of responsibility for harm doing. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21(2), 178–194.
Forsyth, D. R., & Schlenker, B. R. (1977). Attributing the causes of group performance: Effects of performance quality, task importance, and future testing. Journal of Personality, 45(2), 220–236.
Gamson, W. A., & Scotch, N. A. (1964). Scapegoating in baseball. American Journal of Sociology, 70, 69–72.
Gebauer, J., & Lowman, D. (2008). Closing the engagement gap: How great companies unlock employee potential for superior results. New York: Penguin.
Gibson, D. E. (1997). The struggle for reason: The sociology of emotions in organizations. Social Perspectives on Emotion, 4, 211–256.
Gibson, D. E., & Schroeder, S. J. (2003). Who ought to be blamed? The effect of organizational roles on blame and credit attributions. International Journal of Conflict Management, 14(2), 95–117.
Gioia, D. A., Giacalone, R. A., & Rosenfeld, P. (1989). Self-serving bias as a self-sensemaking strategy: Explicit vs. tacit impression management. In R. A. Giacalone & P. Rosenfeld (Eds.), Impression management in the organization (pp. 219–234). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gold, R. (2010, July 19). Rig’s final hours probed. The Wall Street Journal, pp. 1.
Hamilton, V. L. (1978). Who is responsible? Toward a social psychology of responsibility attribution. Social Psychology, 41(4), 316–328.
Hamilton, V. L. (1980). Intuitive psychologist or intuitive lawyer? Alternative models of the attribution process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(5), 767–772.
Hamilton, V. L., Blumenfeld, P. C., Akoh, H., & Miura, K. (1990). Credit and blame among American and Japanese children: Normative, cultural, and individual differences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(3), 442–451.
Hamilton, V. L., Blumenfeld, P. G., & Kushler, R. H. (1988). A question of standards: Attributions of blame and credit for classroom acts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(1), 34–48.
Hamilton, V. L., & Sanders, J. (1981). The effects of roles and deeds on responsibility judgments: The normative structure of wrongdoing. Social Psychology Quarterly, 44(3), 237–254.
Hamilton, V. L., & Sanders, J. (1992). Everyday justice: Responsibility and the individual in Japan and the United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hart, H. L. A. (1968). Punishment and responsibility. Oxford: Clarendon.
Harvey, M. D., & Rule, B. G. (1978). Moral evaluations and judgments of responsibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 4(4), 583–588.
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.
Heneman, R. L., Greenberger, D. B., & Anonyuo, C. (1989). Attributions and exchanges: The effects of interpersonal factors on the diagnosis of employee performance. The Academy of Management Journal, 32(2), 466–476.
Herzberg, F. (1966). Work and the nature of man. New York: T. Y. Crowell.
Homans, G. C. (1950). The human group. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.
Jackall, R. (1983). Moral mazes: Bureaucracy and managerial work. Harvard Business Review (September–October), 118–130.
Janoff-Bulman, R., Sheikh, S., & Hepp, S. (2009). Proscriptive versus prescriptive morality: Two faces of moral regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(3), 521–537.
Jensen, C. B. (2008). Sociology, systems and (patient) safety: Knowledge translations in healthcare policy. Sociology of Health & Illness, 30(2), 309–324.
Jones, E. E., & Davis, K. E. (1965). From acts to dispositions: The attribution process in person perception. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 219–266). New York: Academic.
Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 192–238). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action in folk psychology: An experimental investigation. Philosophical Psychology, 16(2), 309–324.
Kohlberg, L., & Kramer, R. (1969). Continuities and discontinuities in childhood and adult moral development. Human Development, 12(2), 3–120.
Kohn, L. T., Corrigan, J. M., & Donaldson, M. S. (2000). To err is human: Building a safer health system. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Latane, B., Williams, K., & Harkins, S. (1979). Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(6), 822–832.
Lee, F., Peterson, C., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2004). Mea culpa: Predicting stock prices from organizational attributions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(12), 1636–1649.
Leslie, A. M., Knobe, J., & Cohen, A. (2006). Acting intentionally and the side-effect effect: Theory of mind and moral judgment. Psychological Science, 17(5), 421–427.
Lyall, S. (2010, July 12). In BP’s record, a history of boldness and costly blunders. New York Times. Retrieved July 15, 2010, from http://www.nytimes.com
Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 803–855.
Maslow, A. H. (1970). Motivation and personality. New York: Harper and Row.
Mayo, E. (1945). The social problems of an industrial civilization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McElroy, J. C., & Crant, J. M. (2008). Handicapping: The effects of its source and frequency. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(4), 893–900.
Meindl, J. R., & Ehrlich, S. B. (1987). The romance of leadership and the evaluation of organizational performance. The Academy of Management Journal, 30(1), 91–109.
Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), 78–102.
Mitchell, T. R., Green, S. G., & Wood, R. E. (1981). An attributional model of leadership and the poor performing subordinate: Development and validation. In L. Cummings & B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 3, pp. 197–234). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Paradies, M. (2010, May 24). Monday accident & lesson learned: Either you are leading the solution or you are part of the problem. Root Cause Analysis Blog. Retrieved June 15, 2010, from www.taproot.com
Perrow, C. (1999). Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pfeffer, J. (1977). The ambiguity of leadership. The Academy of Management Review, 2, 104–112.
Roberts, K. H. (1990). Some characteristics of high reliability organizations. Organization Science, 1(2), 160–177.
Roethlisberger, F. J., & Dickson, W. J. (1947). Management and the worker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 174–221). New York: Academic.
Ross, M., & diTecco, D. (1975). An attributional analysis of moral judgments. Journal of Social Issues, 31(3), 91–109.
Salancik, G. R., & Meindl, J. R. (1984). Corporate attributions as strategic illusions of management control. Administrative Science Quarterly, 29(2), 238–254.
Schwenk, C. R. (1990). Illusions of management control? Effects of self-serving attributions on resource commitments and confidence in management. Human Relations, 43(4), 333–347.
Shaver, K. G. (1985). The attribution of blame: Causality, responsibility, and blameworthiness. New York: Springer.
Shaw, M. E., & Sulzer, J. L. (1964). An empirical test of Heider’s levels in attribution of responsibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 69, 39–46.
Shultz, T. R., Schleifer, M., & Altman, I. (1981). Judgments of causation, responsibility, and punishment in cases of harmdoing. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 13, 238–253.
Sirgy, M. J. (2002). The psychology of quality of life (Vol. 12). Norwell, MA: Kluwer.
Sirgy, M. J., Michalos, A. C., Ferriss, A. L., Easterlin, R. A., Patrick, D., & Pavot, W. (2006). The quality-of-life (QOL) research movement: Past, present, and future. Social Indicators Research, 76, 343–466.
Sirgy, M. J., Reilly, N. P., Wu, J., & Efraty, D. (2008). A work-life identity model of well-being: Towards a research agenda linking quality-of-work-life (QWL) programs with quality of life (QOL). Applied Research in Quality of Life, 3(3), 181–202.
Sirgy, M. J., & Wu, J. (2009). The pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life: What about the balanced life? Journal of Happiness Studies, 10(2), 183–196.
Tait, M., Padgett, M. Y., & Baldwin, T. T. (1989). Job and life satisfaction: A reevaluation of the strength of the relationship and gender effects as a function of the date of the study. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 74(3), 502–507.
Tetlock, P. E. (1985). Toward an intuitive politician model of attribution processes. In B. R. Schlenker (Ed.), The self and social life (pp. 203–234). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Tetlock, P. E., Self, W. T., & Singh, R. (2010). The punitiveness paradox: When is external pressure exculpatory – And when a signal just to spread blame? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(2), 388–395.
Thoresen, C. J., Kaplan, S. A., Barsky, A. P., Warren, C. R., & de Chermont, K. (2003). The affective underpinnings of job perceptions and attitudes: A meta-analytic review and integration. Psychological Bulletin, 129(6), 914–945.
Tucker, A. L., & Edmondson, A. C. (2003). Why hospitals don’t learn from failures: Organizational and psychological dynamics that inhibit system change. California Management Review, 45(2), 55–72.
Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2001). Managing the unexpected: Assuring high performance in an age of complexity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Weiner, B. (1986). An attributional theory of motivation and emotion. New York: Springer.
Weiner, B. (1995). Judgments of responsibility: A foundation for a theory of social conduct. New York: Guilford Press.
Weiner, B., & Peter, N. (1973). A cognitive-developmental analysis of achievement and moral judgments. Developmental Psychology, 9(3), 290–309.
Wible, A. (2009). Knobe, side effects, and the morally good business. Journal of Business Ethics, 85(Suppl 1), 173–178.
Worthy, J. C. (1959). Big business and free man. New York: Harper.
Yousuf, H. (2010, July 30). BP’s Hayward: ‘I became a villain for doing the right thing’. CNN-Money.com. Retrieved July 30, 2010, from www.money.cnn.com
Zemba, Y., Young, M. J., & Morris, M. W. (2006). Blaming leaders for organizational accidents: Proxy logic in collective- versus individual-agency cultures. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 101(1), 36–51.
Zuckerman, M. (1979). Attribution of success and failure revisited: Or the motivational bias is alive and well in attribution theory. Journal of Personality, 47(2), 245–287.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gibson, D.E., McCann, K. (2012). Blame and Credit Attributions and Quality of Work Life: The Effect of Organizational Structure and Culture. In: Reilly, N., Sirgy, M., Gorman, C. (eds) Work and Quality of Life. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4059-4_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4059-4_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-4058-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-4059-4
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)