The leadership fallacy: How misattribution of leadership leads to a blaming game

Abstract

Assigning responsibility for a project’s success or failure is key to organizational performance, yet attribution fallacies often interfere. Our experimental study (N=339) shows team members mistakenly attribute too much influence to their leaders on task outcomes. Despite task outcomes being randomly determined by easy or hard difficulty rather than leadership, leaders received undue credit or blame. Leaders assessed their teams more negatively in difficult tasks, except for female leaders, who were more lenient in assessing both conditions than men. Leaders' self-assessments did not differ between experimental conditions, confirming their self-motivated evaluation; moreover completing an easy task boosted their confidence for harder challenges. Our study shows that attributional errors manifest differently in the evaluation of leaders and followers and demonstrates that success in simpler tasks can increase leaders' confidence, potentially leading to riskier behaviors.