Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 44, Issue 2, February 2006, Pages 157-168
Safety Science

The self-defensive attribution hypothesis in the work environment: Co-workers’ perspectives

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Abstract

The study explored the possible influences of situational, personal and non-relevant perception on causality attributions and responsibility assignment in Ghana’s work environment. Ghanaian industrial workers (co-workers) who were witnesses to industrial accidents (n = 117) assigned causality for the mishap and their responses were compared. Analyses were based on the co-workers’ responses to open-ended questions. Three categories of co-workers were identified and labelled as situationally relevant (n = 34), personally relevant (n = 43) and non-relevant co-workers (n = 40). The results showed that co-workers (witnesses) who had some perception of situational and or personal relevance with the accident victims attributed less responsibility to the accident victims than did their counterparts who had no perception of relevance. This observation, like other motivated attributional distortions, seems to reflect a tendency towards self-protection from the three categories of co-workers. It confirms the self-defensive attribution hypothesis in causal attributions about accidents in the work environment.

Introduction

Attribution theory basically suggests that people generally make causal attributions for their own and other peoples’ behaviour to facilitate understanding and to shape future behaviour. They do this by assessing the co-variation between the cause and effect variables (Heider, 1958, Kelley, 1973). The importance of causal attributions in both social psychology and safety literature is well documented. In the social psychology literature, the attribution model is considered as one of the most appropriate analytical tools for exploratory and descriptive studies (e.g. Kenworthy and Miller, 2003, Weiner, 1986, Wong, 2000), and has been employed extensively in work environment studies (e.g. Green and Mitchell, 1979, Martinko, 1995, Weiner and Allred, 1998). For example, workplace attributional analyses have been used to predict behaviour in hazardous work environments (Furnham, 1998) and have served as explanatory frameworks for management’s decisions to reprimand and or terminate employees (Ashkanasy, 1995, Mitchell and Wood, 1980, Struthers et al., 1992). Additionally, they have provided models for the analysis of behaviour in the face of danger (Hale and Glendon, 1987), as well as models for ergonomic perception of workplace accidents (Woodcock, 1991).

According to the literature on causal attribution and accidents, attributional distortions are numerous in novel and ambiguous situations (Wong and Weiner, 1981) where multiple causal agents exist; these are characteristics that aptly describe the conditions accompanying industrial accidents (DeJoy, 1990, Turner and Pidgeon, 1997). The work environment therefore seems to be an appropriate domain to examine causal attribution biases and distortions that are associated with accident occurrences. According to the social psychological literature, there is a tendency by people to bias perceptions of causality to satisfy the perceiver’s personal motivations. An example of such attributional distortion occurs when people use self-protective mechanisms to project blame for personal inadequacies and failures onto external circumstances. This has been labeled the self-defensive Attribution (Shaver, 1970, Walster, 1966).

The self-defensive attribution hypothesis originated from a study by Walster (1966) and assumes that the participants in an accident process tend to explain the accident occurrence in a way that minimizes their personal responsibility. It is often described as a notion of self-protective attributional distortion by which people deny or minimize the implication of their responsibility in failure events (Blass, 1996, Burger, 1981) in order to protect their self-esteem (Zuckerman, 1979). It originated from a study by Walster (1966). However, subsequent attempts by Walster (1967) to replicate her findings failed. Contrary to her predictions, she found no increase in responsibility assignment as accident severity increased. Shaver (1970), in a replicative study noted the importance of the degree of relevance or similarity between the accident perpetrator and the witness. He found that before motivation for attributional distortion and perceiver bias can occur, the perceivers must first feel some similarity or relevance with the accident victim. Drawing from these analyses, Shaver coined the term defensive attribution to suggest how people are motivated to bias and distort causality and responsibility assignments in order to minimize their own responsibility for negative incidents.

The defensive attribution hypothesis has been confirmed in laboratory studies (Shaw and Skolnick, 1971, Chaikin and Darley, 1973), and has received support from empirical research in the work environment (Gyekye, 2001, Gyekye and Salminen, 2004, Kouabenan, 1985, Kouabenan et al., 2001, Salminen, 1992). These studies have indicated that both victims and supervisors tend to attribute an accident occurrence to causal factors in a way that diminished their own responsibility. Reviews by Vidmar and Crinklaw, 1974, Burger, 1981 have supported this stance. Regrettably, the bulk of the research on defensive attributions has focused on supervisor and subordinate workers’ causal attributions. Conspicuously missing are empirical studies that have examined the self-defensive attribution hypothesis from witnesses’ perspective and the importance of relevance perception.

The current study was designed to fill the gap in the literature on self-defensive attributions. It is part of a larger explorative study that examined causal and responsibility attributions for industrial accidents among Ghanaian workers. It was thus designed to obtain data in a naturalistic work setting in accident scenarios in which co-workers actually experienced the distress of their fellow workers in unfeigned and authentic accident situations. It was expected that this empathic concern would elicit emotional arousal and impact on causal attributions than observations in experimental studies.

Drawing from Shaver’s (1970) intriguing findings on similarity relevance in responsibility assignment, we propose that victim blame will decrease when there is similarity between witnesses and accident victims, and vice versa.

Section snippets

Participants

The participants were actual victims, witnesses and supervisors involved in workplace accidents. Witnesses are co-workers who saw the accident occurrence or were close enough to the accident scene to offer substantial account of the accident process. Witnesses and co-workers are used interchangeably in this study. To assure the crucial accident severity dimension that is needed in the self-defence strategies (Kouabenan et al., 2001, Shaver, 1970), all cases studied were classified as serious by

Results

The one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed statistically significant differences between the causality attributions of the three subgroups on the External Causal Factors Scale (F(2,114) = 7.46, p < 0.05) and on the Internal Causal Factors Scale (F(2,114) = 13.31, p < 0.05). Co-workers identified as situationally and personally relevant had almost the same view of the accident causality.

Discussion

The primary observation was that witnesses assigned responsibility and blame to the victims only when they did not perceive similarity or relevance. This observation, like other motivated attributional distortions, seems to point to self-protection from both categories of witnesses. Explanations for the observed divergence in the causality and responsibility attributions are discussed below.

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