"It's not my fault - but only I can change it'': Counterfactual and prefactual thoughts of managers.

Managers evaluate their subordinates' performance on a regular basis. This is most obvious--and most formal--in personnel assessment procedures, serving the purposes of both evaluation and feedback--although the two purposes need not necessarily be pursued simultaneously. Less obviously, and far less formally, superiors evaluate their subordinates' performance on a day-to-day basis in order to plan personnel guidance measures. Both the cognitive processes involved in performance evaluation, as well as the consequences of causal attributions, are central to attribution theory. This in part accounts for the frequent use of this theory in organizational psychology and, in particular, in theories of organizational leadership. The purpose of the study was to provide a more unequivocal test of self-serving patterns in leaders' causal evaluations of their subordinates' performance other than the classical attributional asymmetry approach.

Accession Number: 12906452; Goerke, Martin 1; Email Address: martin.goerke@uni-bielefeld.de; Möller, Jens 1; Schulz-Hardt, Stefan 2; Napiersky, Uwe 1; Frey, Dieter 3; Affiliations: 1: Department of Psychology, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany; 2: Institute of Industrial, Organizational, and Social Psychology, Technical University Dresden, Dresden, Germany; 3: Department of Psychology, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany; Issue Info: Apr2004, Vol. 89 Issue 2, p279; Thesaurus Term: Employee reviews; Thesaurus Term: Personnel management; Thesaurus Term: Executives; Thesaurus Term: Leadership; Thesaurus Term: Industrial psychology; Thesaurus Term: Industrial relations; Subject Term: Feedback (Psychology); NAICS/Industry Codes: 541612 Human Resources Consulting Services; NAICS/Industry Codes: 923130 Administration of Human Resource Programs (except Education, Public Health, and Veterans' Affairs Programs); Number of Pages: 14p; Document Type: Article