BUSI 3310 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Fundamental Attribution Error, Dispositional Attribution
Document Summary
Attribution is the process by which causes or motives are assigned to explain people"s behavior. Dispositional attributions are explanations for behavior based on an actor"s personality of intellect. Situational attributions are explanations for behavior based on an actor"s external situation or environment. The attribution process is important because many rewards and punishments in organizations are based on judgments about what really cased a target person to behave a certain way. Reflect how consistently a person engages in some behavior over time. Reflect how a person"s behavior compares with that of others. Reflect the extent to which a person engages in some behavior across a variety of situations. Behaviors that lack distinctiveness (and thus occurs in various situations) provoke dispositional attributions. When a behavior is highly distinctive in that it occurs in only one situation, we are likely to assume that some aspect of the situation caused the behavior.