Blame and credit attributions and quality of work life: The effect of organizational structure and culture

Abstract

Employees’ affective responses to their work have increasingly been linked to their subjective well-being and their quality of life (QOL) overall. One source of subjective well-being for individuals is the credit they receive for organizational successes and the blame they receive for failures. This chapter presents two ethical dilemmas involving blame and credit attributions. In determining how to address these dilemmas, we review the research literature on responsibility assignments, integrate recent research on blame contagion, describe how this process can affect employees’ willingness to take risks and report errors, and examines how these processes can impact an organization’s capacity to learn. We finally integrate these findings in a model of blame assignment in organizations, proposing structural and cultural interventions that may help to address some of the problematic outcomes of blame and credit attributions for QWL.