About Bias and Austrians

Lately, I have been so preoccupied with getting acquainted with the topic of Statistical Analysis that I nearly forgot about the intellectual loves of my life, Authentic Leadership and Positive Sales. You bet I thought about boring you with formulas and numbers on this blog just to make you share my hardship whilst finishing my PhD curriculum. But then I thought better of it. Instead, I decided, I will share with you a discovery I made online: an Austrian academic in the USA who is doing impressive work on Attribution theory, amongst many other research topics. During a statistics-less lunch break one day I came across one of his publications and a piece of Almond Joy nearly got stuck in my throat: his findings seemed to shatter part of my PhD-hypothesis!

But let me start at the beginning.

In short, the correlation between Attribution theory and Authentic Leadership that some researchers see, is based on one particular trait that authentic leaders have: they are less biased when it comes to information about themselves and their subordinates. That means, that they can form more accurate perceptions about who’s done what and why, and they can assess successes and failures more objectively by taking lots o information into account. Why is this special? Because we are all human and prone to lots of biases: terms like ‘leader bias’ (form of self-serving bias) and ‘actor-observer bias’ being most relevant here. The proper word for ‘leader-bias’ is self-serving bias because it refers to our tendency to take more accountability for successes than for failures. Translated into leadership situations this could represent the tendency of a manager to take the praise for his team’s good work because he thinks it was down to his leadership, whilst blaming them for their setbacks, attributing the failure to others. (Can you guess why this can be detrimental to the relationship between leaders and associates?!).

The actor-observer bias is an old psychological hypothesis that has been supported by dozens of researchers since the 70’s; it says that an observer (i.e. leader) will attribute the reasons for his subordinate’s behavior to their own disposition (subordinate’s ability, motivation, mood etc) whilst the actor (i.e. subordinate) refers mainly to situational circumstances (hard job, difficult customer, tough environment). This mismatch of attributions from both parties can be counterproductive and does not really help in performance development reviews. But there is a silver lining on the dark bias-horizon: if leaders are authentic, some say, they are aware of these biases – theirs and others – and they can handle these difficult situations more accurately and fairly. Sounds logical to me!

And then the bombshell by Professor Bertram Malle who did a comprehensive study about the actor-observer bias just to find out that there is a lack of support for the actor-observer-bias. Normally I would have faked blindness and ignored the article because it seemed counterproductive for my great PhD-undertaking (only joking, of course!!), but the fact that B.F. Malle stems from Austria, and earned his Masters Degrees at the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz (like me) was too strong an indicator for quality work to be disregarded. After working through some of his articles it turns out, there is an actor-observer asymmetry after all but it is more complicated than what’s been assumed before. He says that if you look for a simplistic way for people to explain behavior in terms like “person causes” and “situation causes” and have them rate it, then the old actor-observer bias isn’t really there. But if you get people to explain other people’s behaviors in their own words and distinguish between reasons such as desire or belief, and in causes and causal histories, then the expected difference between attributions an actor and an observer have, appear again.

Uff, my PhD hypothesis has been resuscitated. I can still try to find out whether it is actually true that authentic leaders for all their qualities are able to overcome, or at least work around their own attributional bias about their subordinates' performance.

So what else have I learned from that encounter with an Austrian alumni?

1.    Leaders be aware that you might be biased towards your subordinates behaviors

There is scientific support for an actor-observer asymmetry. If you find that you are affected, please contact me to discuss ways to overcome it.

2.    Karl-Franzens-University in Graz, Austria is a good place to study.

Servus to all their students and alumni all over the world!

For links, articles and references contact andrea@derlercoaching.com