Sex Roles

, Volume 34, Issue 1–2, pp 1–15 | Cite as

Gender and managers' causal attributions for subordinate performance: A field story

  • Patrice Rosenthal
Article

Abstract

The study addresses the effect of gender on managers' causal explanations for subordinate work performance. Prior laboratory studies suggest women's work performance will be attributed in a manner disadvantageous to their career progression within organizations. There are, however, numerous reasons to question the generalizability of the laboratory work to organizational settings. The study was performed to address the gap in field research on this issue. Ninety-three mainly Caucasian managers in two organizations made attributions for successful and unsuccessful performance of direct subordinates. Contrary to the hypotheses, subordinate gender was unrelated to managers' causal explanations for either positive or negative outcomes. Implications of the results for future research on attributional gender effects in organizational settings are discussed.

Keywords

Social Psychology Laboratory Study Field Research Laboratory Work Work Performance 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Plenum Publishing Corporation 1996

Authors and Affiliations

  • Patrice Rosenthal
    • 1
  1. 1.Industrial Relations DepartmentLondon School of EconomicsLondonEngland

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