Management Papers

Document Type

Journal Article

Date of this Version

9-2013

Publication Source

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Volume

122

Issue

1

Start Page

22

Last Page

35

DOI

10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.03.007

Abstract

Managers face hard choices between process and outcome systems of accountability in evaluating employees, but little is known about how managers resolve them. Building on the premise that political ideologies serve as uncertainty-reducing heuristics, two studies of working managers show that: (1) conservatives prefer outcome accountability and liberals prefer process accountability in an unspecified policy domain; (2) this split becomes more pronounced in a controversial domain (public schools) in which the foreground value is educational efficiency but reverses direction in a controversial domain (affirmative action) in which the foreground value is demographic equality; (3) managers who discover employees have subverted their preferred system favor tinkering over switching to an alternative system; (4) but bipartisan consensus arises when managers have clear evidence about employee trustworthiness and the tightness of the causal links between employee effort and success. These findings shed light on ideological and contextual factors that shape preferences for accountability systems.

Copyright/Permission Statement

© 2013. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Keywords

accountability, process, outcome, motivated reasoning, ideology, equality, efficiency, attribution errors, trustworthiness

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Date Posted: 27 November 2017

This document has been peer reviewed.