The downside of decision delegation: When transferring decision responsibility incurs interpersonal costs

Abstract

When facing decisions, managers and employees often seek coworker support. They may ask for advice, retaining decision responsibility, or delegate, transferring decision responsibility. Prior work shows that people who seek decision support via delegation expect to avoid the burdens of decision responsibility, like regret and blame. But might these anticipated benefits sometimes come at an interpersonal cost? Drawing from fairness theory, we hypothesize and find that decision support providers often respond to delegators (versus advice seekers) with reduced willingness to help them with future decisions or hire them, perceiving those seeking to offload decision responsibility as less fair. This interpersonal penalization is attenuated when the potential for perceived unfairness is reduced: when decision responsibility transfer is perceived as less likely to make the support provider worse off (when the decision involves allocating desirable outcomes to others) or more legitimate (when the decision lies within the scope of the helper’s role).