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Attrabution Theory

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Submitted By khaledvectra
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People are different in their attitudes and actions in general, and individuals inside any organization behave in a variety of ways. Organizational Managers judge employees according to their own perceptions. Sometimes, the misunderstanding of the causes behind employees’ behaviour affects decision making and leads to incorrect judgments. Attribution theory illustrates the different causes of behaviour. Applying attribution theory in any work place reduces some passive managerial outcomes which could lead to high absences and turnover. Additionally, a good awareness of attribution theory helps in achieving goal oriented organizational behaviour such as increasing the levels of productivity and achieving appropriate perception, job satisfaction, motivation and organizational citizenship among employees. Through this essay an example of a salesperson who is recently shifted from the warehouse department to the sales department and fails in achieving his monthly target will be applied.

Heider who was the founder of attribution theory concentrated on internal and external causes of behaviour (Martinko, Harvey & Douglas, 2007; Harvey & Martinko, 2009). Accordingly, the internal causes of the salesperson’s failure to achieve his monthly target could be his laziness, his absence or failure to target the right customers, while the external reasons behind failing could be national economic status, the product failure to cover the customers’ needs or that product was competing with a new one. Moreover, another important behavioral cause is relational attribution which means that the cause of a situation can be analyzed by the relationship between the individual and another one (Eberly, Holley, Johnson & Mitchell, 2011). This causal attribution means that there was no communication between the salesperson and his manager, so he did not know that there was another product competing with their product in markets or maybe the manager did not know the needs of the salesperson in transportation like a van. The failure to achieve the monthly target is a result of bad communication and interaction with his senior. Hence, relational attribution differ from internal and external causes in the role they play in achieving development in organization as both partner in the relationship have to be responsible for the situation. (Ren, H & Gray, B. 2009, ; Dirks, K. T., Lewicki, R. J & Zaheer, A. 2009 cited in Eberly, Holley, Johnson & Mitchell, 2011). This shared responsibility signifies that the salesperson is responsible, as well, for the outcome of the situation as he must have informed his boss that he needed a van to reach customers

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