MT302 Unit 2 Perception and Attribution Paper Example

The Late Packages Were the County's: An MT302 Unit 2 Perception and Attribution Paper on One Misjudged Week

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT302: Organizational Behavior

Unit 2 Perception and Attribution Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The office, the week and the people are composite; the theories and studies cited are real.

The Week, Monday to Friday

I work as a closing coordinator at a composite title and escrow office in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Coordinators assemble closing packages; examiners search the public record and clear title before a closing can be scheduled. In April, a new examiner joined the team. Her files were assigned by county, and that week she received most of the files from one neighboring county.

Monday. Two of her title commitments due at noon arrived at 3:40 p.m. I messaged a colleague: "New examiner already behind."

Tuesday. One commitment due Tuesday arrived Wednesday morning. My two own closing packages for Thursday went out late Tuesday evening; I wrote to the escrow officer that the county's recording system had been slow.

Wednesday. I flagged her in the team channel as a risk for Friday closings. She replied that the county's online records were down for part of each day.

Thursday. A third commitment arrived late. I wrote: "Not sure she's detail-oriented enough for this."

Friday. At the weekly meeting, the office manager mentioned that the county had migrated its recording system the previous week and that every office in the area was running behind on that county.

I described the examiner's delays as character and my own delays as circumstance, in the same week, about the same county.

Kelley's Covariation Model

Kelley (1973) proposed that people judge whether behavior is caused by the person or by the situation by looking at three kinds of information: consensus, whether other people behave the same way in the same situation; distinctiveness, whether the person behaves differently in other situations; and consistency, whether this person has acted this way on other occasions. If hardly anyone else behaves this way, if the person behaves this way in every setting and if it keeps happening, observers locate the cause in the person. If plenty of others behave this way, if the person behaves differently in other settings and if this is a first, the cause lies in the circumstances.

I answered each question from records, not memory.

Consensus: high. The file log shows that the two other examiners who had files from the same county that week also missed deadlines, on four of seven files.

Distinctiveness: high. The new examiner's files from two other counties that week were all on time.

Consistency: low. In her first two weeks, before the migration, her files were all on time.

The pattern, high, high and low, points to a cause outside the person: the county's records system.

The evidence to see the county as the cause was in our own file log the whole week; I simply did not look for it.

The Errors in My Own Reading

The fundamental attribution error. Ross (1977) described how observers give too much weight to a person's character and too little to the circumstances when they account for what someone else did. My Thursday message, "not sure she's detail-oriented enough," is a clear example: I explained three late files by a trait, though I had no evidence about her attention to detail at all.

The actor-observer asymmetry. When I was late on Tuesday, I blamed the county. When she was late, I blamed her. Malle (2006), reviewing studies of the actor-observer asymmetry, found that the general version of the effect is weaker and less consistent than once believed, but that it appears under some conditions, including when the behavior is negative. My week fits those conditions: the behavior was negative and I was both actor and observer at once.

A self-serving pattern. My explanation for my own lateness was not only situational but convenient: it protected my standing with the escrow officer. I did not check whether the county was really the reason for my packages, though it was.

Perception Before Attribution

Attribution starts with what we notice. I noticed the new examiner's lateness partly because a new colleague is watched more closely. I did not notice the two experienced examiners' late files on the same county, because I was not watching them. Robbins and Judge (2019) describe selective perception, in which people interpret what they see based on their interests and expectations. I expected a new hire to struggle, so I saw the evidence that she was struggling and missed the evidence that everyone was.

What It Cost

The cost was not dramatic, but it was real. My Wednesday flag in the team channel made the office manager reassign one of the examiner's Friday files to a colleague, who then ran late on it for the same reason. The examiner told me later that she spent that week wondering whether she had made a mistake taking the job. And my messages to another coordinator, though private, shaped how that coordinator saw her for weeks.

Why the Error Was Easy to Make

The structure of our office made this error likely. Coordinators see examiners' work only as arrival times in the queue; we do not see the county systems they search. A late file looks the same whether the examiner was slow or the county was down. The file log that answered all three of Kelley's questions sits in a report most coordinators never open. New staff are also discussed informally in their first weeks, in messages like mine, so early impressions spread before any evidence arrives. None of this excuses what I wrote, but it explains why the same error could happen to the next new hire unless something changes.

Checks I Now Run Before Judging a Colleague

1. Ask the consensus question first. Before deciding why someone is late, check whether others working on the same kind of task are late too. In our office, the file log answers that in two minutes.

2. Compare the person with themselves. Look at the same person's work in other situations and earlier weeks before concluding anything about character.

3. Apply my own explanation to them. If I would blame the county for my delay, I ask whether the county could explain theirs.

Conclusion

Kelley's model, answered from the office's own records, shows that the new examiner's late files that week were caused by the county's system migration, not by carelessness. My judgment of her was a fundamental attribution error, sharpened by selective perception of a new colleague and by a self-serving explanation of my own delays. The three checks above are how I intend to avoid repeating it.

References

Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28(2), 107-128. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034225

Malle, B. F. (2006). The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: A (surprising) meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 895-919. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.895

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2019). Organizational behavior (18th ed.). Pearson.

Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173-220. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60357-3