While flying home from a weekend visit with my son in Houston, Texas, I got a flash of insight into why it is so difficult to train managers to be more effective. I was reading “The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making” when I realized managers make a fundamental error in their understanding of what determines human behavior. Furthermore, they don’t know it and telling them makes little or no difference.
If you go into any workplace, what you will see is people doing things. They are talking to each other, walking from one place to another, working on their computers, sitting in meetings, etc. In short, what you see is people and their behavior. What you don’t see are such context factors as the hierarchy of authority (titles and reporting relationships), workflow, accountability, trust, personal relationships, goals and objectives, or most of the other things that happen “in between” people. People and behavior are in the foreground, context factors are in the background.
Why does this matter? Because it leads to what is called the “fundamental attribution error” in which observers overattribute behavior to the dispositional factors (e.g., attitudes, emotions, motivations, skills, traits) of people rather than to contextual factors. I can see you and your behavior, but I can’t see all the context factors or how they are impacting you. As a result, when you do something – more often when you don’t do something – I look to you and you alone for the explanation. I assume it has something to do with your commitment, your attitude, your motivation, your competence, whether you care, etc. I don’t look to me and our relationship, or to the myriad things you have to deal with, or any of the factors going on between you, me, and others. In short, your behavior is a function of you and you alone.
The impact of making this “error” is that if I want you to behave in some different way, for example, being more accountable, then I will try to alter your disposition in some way. I might send you to training, talk to you about the value of being accountable in an attempt to motivate you to be more accountable, or any number of other things to change your disposition. What I won’t do, however, is consider other context explanations, such as our conversations, and whether your being accountable is a function of the requests I make and whether I consistently follow up on them.
In my MBA class on management, I assign the book “Leadership and Self Deception” (I strongly recommend it). Its and easy and engaging book in which the “hero” of the story discovers he has been interacting with people based on erroneous attributions, how and why he made those attributions, and the impact the errors have had on his leadership. What I find particularly interesting is that students don’t want to talk about how they make similar attribution errors and how to overcome them. They want to talk about how then can stop their boss or the people around them from making the error!
That was the second part of my insight – the fundamental attribution error is extremely persistent. Even in the face of evidence to the contrary, people will continue making the same attribution error. In other words, telling people, even demonstrating to people, that they are making an error, an error that has negative real life consequences, they will persist in the error.
For years I have wondered why it was that even though countless of articles and experts have said it is not possible to motivate others, that motivation is an internal state, managers persisted in wanting to know “How can I motivate them?” I now see an answer – they believe behavior is a function of disposition, not context, and anything said to the contrary is ignored. That belief makes my job harder and reduces the opportunity for breakthroughs in leader effectiveness.
