Organisation Behavior

2. When Professor Anderson returned to her class, her students objected to their grades. The students argued that the assignment was too vague and the grading did not accurately reflect their knowledge. Professor Anderson believes the assignment to be fair, and that the class had chosen not to work on it until the last minutes. In this context, explain the attribution process, and relate how the concepts of fundamental attribution error and self-serving bias might account for the difference in perceptions between Professor Anderson and her class.

Answer

Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment. However, what one’s perceive can be substantially different from objective reality. For example, all employees in a firm may view it as a great place to work – favorable working conditions, interesting job assignments, good pay, excellent benefits, understanding and responsible management – but, as most of us know, it’s very unusual to find such agreement.

Fundamentals attribution error is the tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behavior of others. In other words, we blame people first, not the situation. For example, when a sales executive doesn’t achieve his target, the manager will blame his poor performance but not because of poor economic or high competition.

In this case, the professor is doing a fundamentals attribution error. When her students is getting low grade in the assignment, she blames her students had chosen not to work on it until the last minutes. But she did not try to found out the reason why the students do badly in their assignment. For example, maybe the students have many assignments need to submit on that period, so they not enough time to prepare the assignment well and maybe the assignment provide by her are too tough.

Self-serving...