Attribution Theory Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This special issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior was developed to further extend attribution theory and its application to the field of organizational behavior. In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the motivation for this special issue, a concise summary of the papers included in it, a discussion about progress toward the field's goals, and suggestions for how future research can move the field forward. In doing so, we describe how applying attribution theory to studies that utilize a broad range of study designs, research contexts, and focal topics results in insights that enhance our understanding of how attributional processes predict and explain individuals' emotions and behaviors. We also provide suggestions for how to further develop attribution theory so we can more clearly describe the generaliz-ability of relationships across a wide variety of organizational contexts. KEYWORDS attribution, leadership, motivation 1 | INTRODUCTION Attribution theory provides the framework necessary to understand how individuals explain why events in their environment happened (i.e., they make causal ascriptions; Heider, 1958). Several factors stimulated the need for this special issue on attribution theory. First, recent journal articles have made it clear that the potential of attribu-tion theory to contribute to the organizational sciences has not been realized. In particular, an article by Martinko, Harvey, and Dasborough (2011) pointed out that although a significant proportion of journal space in social psychology is devoted to attributional perspectives of human behavior, a disproportionally small amount of space is devoted to attributional topics in organizational behavior journals. In that article , they note that many researchers have misconstrued discussions of attribution theory by downplaying the utility of the construct. A recent article by Harvey, Madison, Martinko, Crook, and Crook (2014) directly addressed the criticisms regarding the explanatory power of attribution theory (Lord & Smith, 1983; Mitchell, 1982) by demonstrating through a meta-analysis that the amount of variance in organizational outcomes that is accounted for by attributional constructs is similar to other more popular constructs, such as organizational justice and organizational citizenship behaviors. Although recent articles document that attribution theory has the potential to fill many of the gaps in our understanding of organizational behavior, its potential has not been unrealized. Despite the relative paucity of contributions focusing on attribu-tional processes, recent contributions have been encouraging because they document the importance of attributional processes. These advances include a recent Academy of Management Review article by Chan and McAllister (2014) that cites attribution theory as a core explanation for subordinates' perceptions of abusive supervision. Also, an Academy of Management Review article coauthored by Terry Mitchell and his colleagues (Eberly, Holley, Johnson, & Mitchell, 2011) explicated the construct of relational attributions. Finally, a Journal of Organizational Behavior article by Burton, Taylor, and Barber (2014) empirically tested the constructs of internal, external, and relational attributions in subordinate/supervisory relations.