Businesses shouldn’t be so quick to assign blame to employees when problems arise, new research finds. Rather than dismissing a problem as the result of one employee’s incompetence, businesses should look deeper to find the root of the problem, according to a study recently published in the Academy of Management Journal.
“Concentrated failures prompt narrower attributions of responsibility, which, whether accurate or not, ultimately lead to less thorough investigations and fewer of the system-wide changes that are typically required to address organizational performance problems,” wrote Vinit Desai, the study’s author and an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado, Denver.
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