Credit attribution bias and its impact on employee morale and retention

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-04-2019-159
Date08 April 2019
Pages80-83
Published date08 April 2019
AuthorArijit Goswami,Jatin Pandey
Subject MatterHr & organizational behaviour,Employee behaviour
Rewards
Credit attribution bias and its impact on
employee morale and retention
Arijit Goswami and Jatin Pandey
Is someone stealing your
thunder?
Mr X woke up early morning, excited
about the informal felicitation
ceremony at the office that was
supposed to recognize the team’s
success with an international project.
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.
Do not be surprised if Mr X seems to
be your reflection from your initial
years in corporate life or even your
current situation. The way recognition
is done in corporate circles can get
skewed toward a single person. It is
not rare to find one person who
“steals the thunder,” while the rest of
the team just wonders why their hard
work was in vain. 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 acknowledgmentand
disproportionate allocationof benefits
to one or two individuals in a team. A
lot of psychological factors are at play
in such a scenario.
The situation
First impressions matter a lot, and it is
quite hard to change the perceptions
borne out of first impressions. In a
corporate setting, it may so happen
that out of a project team, one person
shines out. Let us call him “Y.” The
reasons can be one or more of the
following.
Organizational factors
During the job, a person becomes
the spokesperson for the team.He/
she is preferred over others for
communication with supervisors,
either due to his/her greater
knowledge or better
communication skills. Over time,
this person is always pushed to
interact with supervisors and
steadily, he/she becomes the face
of the team. Therefore, the person
has higher visibility when it comes
to communication between the
team and the superiors.
The zero-sum kind of appraisal
system leads Y to try to stand out
by increasing visibility in team
meetings, regular client calls and
occasional meetings with
supervisors. The perceived
expectation of success that Y
gets out of such behavior and the
supportive response that he/she
gets reinforces the practice.
Individual factors
If an employee takes the initiative
to be the spokesperson of the
team when it comes to stand-up
calls or meetings, then he/she
Arijit Goswami is based at the Indian
Institute of Management Kozhikode,
Kozhikode, India. Jatin Pandey is
based at the Department of
Organizational Behaviour and Human
Resource Management, Indian
Institute of Management, Indore,
India.
PAGE 80 jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEW jVOL. 18 NO. 2 2019, pp. 80-83, ©EmeraldPublishing Limited,ISSN 1475-4398 DOI 10.1108/SHR-04-2019-159

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