It’s hard to reach 100% equal or fair, especially when individual interpretation is involved. Claire Zillman expressed her opinion by stating that “Assigning blame too quickly for failures at work can backfire – big time.”1, and I’m on her side.
In this news clip, Claire found that leaders tend to fix the failures by simply firing individuals or specific groups when they’re involved in failures over and over instead of digging into the failures and see what’s behind the surface. The employers might think it’s the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to get away from failing again. The strategy sometimes works for small firms or some specific cases, however, if highly localized failures keep repeating, the employers had better address larger issues.
The employers could make errors when assign blame too quickly for failures. People sometimes make interpretation using attribution theory that we tend to notice atypical behaviors and add meanings ourselves. This interpretation methods could lead to fundamental attribution error as we always underestimate external factors and emphasize internal factors while judging others; but we always believe in external factors for failures while judging ourselves. In the workplace, the employers tend to blame and fire the employees when there’re actually some external factors affecting the efficiency and effectiveness negatively.
Things could also go wrong when people make quick decisions based on the attribution error. The firing method could get serious if the employer ignores the larger issues. In the movie War Dogs, the protagonist David quickly decided to quit the firm AEY instead of having communication with his partner Efraim and this resulted in Efraim’s anxiety and David even got threatened. If David took his time, he might have calmed down and realize the conflict between Efraim and him also came from his compromising and submissive behaviors while working.
Assigning blame too quickly for failures is not a good phenomenon for a healthy and well-functioning organization. The leader should always remind themselves to think unbiasedly, penetrate and identify larger issues, and make appropriate decisions at low opportunity costs. Little failures add up, and the ignorance will eventually result in big pay offs.
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1. Zillman, Claire . “Assigning blame too quickly for failures at work can backfire—big time.” Fortune. N.p., 08 Sept. 2015. Web. 01 Apr. 2017. <http://fortune.com/2015/09/08/blame-failure-work/>.