Beschreibung:
The correct assignment of responsibility for either the success or failure of a project is a crucial factor in an organization's performance. However, people are prone to several attribution fallacies that hinder this process. Our pre-registered experimental study ( N = 339) finds that team members overestimate the influence of their leaders on the outcome of a joint task. Leaders were unjustifiably attributed credit for success or responsibility for failure, even though the outcome of the task was influenced only by its difficulty, and not by the leader’s performance. Moreover, while the leaders’ self-assessment did not vary between easy and difficult tasks, leaders undertaking the difficult task rated their team members worse than those undertaking the easy one. However, female leaders in general were more lenient in their assessment in both conditions than men. Although leaders did not initially consider themselves more capable than other group members, solving the easy task resulted in increased confidence in solving the next, more difficult, task. Our results suggest a significant effect of attribution errors in both the leaders’ and teams’ evaluations; we also showed how random success may lead to a boost of confidence for leaders and associated risky behavior