Manag., January-2017-Q10
- Option : D
- Explanation : Attribution theory is concerned with the relationship between personal social perception and interpersonal behaviour. There
are a number of attribution theories, but they share the following assumptions:
1. We seek to make sense of our world.
2. We often attribute people’s actions either to internal or external causes.
3. We do so in fairly logical ways.
Well-known social psychologist Harold Kelley stressed that attribution theory is concerned mainly with the cognitive processes by which an individual interprets behaviour as being caused by (or attributed to) certain parts of the relevant environment. It is concerned with the “why” questions of work motivation and organizational behaviour. Because most causes, attributes, and “whys” are not directly observable, the theory says that people must depend on cognitions, particularly perception. The attribution theorist assumes that humans are rational and are motivated to identify and understand the causal structure of their relevant environment. It is this search for attributes that characterizes attribution theory and helps explain work motivation. Attribution theory has its roots in all the pioneering cognitive theorists work (for example, that of Lewin and Festinger), in de Charmes’s ideas on cognitive evaluation, and in Bern’s notion of “self-perception,” the theory’s initiator is generally recognized to be Fritz Heider. Heider believed that both internal forces (personal attributes such as ability, effort, and fatigue) and external forces (environmental attributes such as rules and the weather) combine additively to determine behaviour. He stressed that it is the perceived, not the actual, determinants that are important to behaviour. People will behave differently if they perceive internal attributes than they will if they perceive external attributes. It is this concept of differential ascriptions that has very important implications for motivation and organizational behaviour in general.
