
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
Recommended Citation
Tetlock, P. E., Vieider, F. M., Patil, S. V., & Grant, A. (2013). Accountability and Ideology: When Left Looks Right and Right Looks Left. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 122 (1), 22-35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.03.007
Included in
Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons
Date Posted: 27 November 2017
This document has been peer reviewed.