Responsibility Bias, Self-Serving Bias.. A pitfall that one should avoid

The Responsibly Bias is very common in any group who are jointly responsible for doing a certain task or achieving a common target. It is common in teams, couples etc and you can notice the existence of this fact whether in business or personal life. The first time I came across this terminology was in a wonderful book titled “Give and Take” written by ADAM GRANT. From my point of view, it is one of the must read book due to several reasons that need a special article for elaboration. More research on this fascinating topic led me to what is known by social phycologists as “Self-Serving Bias”, “cognitive Bias” and “attribution theory. They are all closely related, as all of these practices lead to systematic deviations in the way we think, that can lead at the end to errors in our beliefs, decision making process and judgment.

The responsibility Bias can simply, and if seen from the business perspective, be defined as the natural tendency of each of a team member to exaggerate his/her own contribution (say in achieving a certain target) relative to the contribution of other team members. To understand this puzzle, let us assume that we have a team of three that is assigned for doing a certain task. Let us then ask each one of them about his contribution to the team achievement. If one of them states that his contribution is 45%, and the 2nd states that his is 35%, then and if perfectly calibrated, the 3rd should have claim the remaining 20% as the sum of the contributions should be 100%. Unfortunately, research proved that this is not what happens in reality. In most cases, the sum of the claimed contributions exceeds 100%, and in a team of 6, it is around 140%. This is what is known as “Responsibility Bias”. Amazingly, the same result will be noticed if applied in personal relations too as studies proved that the sum of the estimated contribution of each of the partners in most couples exceeds 100%. Again, it is the exaggerating of one’s own effort and/or contribution relative to others’ ones.

The self-serving bias may be one of the sources of such dilemma. Self-serving bias is defined as our tendency to attribute our success to personal characteristics, and attribute our failure to factors beyond our control. Simply, it is our tendency to take the credit for positive events of our lives, but blame external factors when it comes to negative events.

The responsibility bias is mainly driven by two things:

1.    The desire to see and present ourselves positively. We are continually seeking self-enhancement, attempting to uphold our own self-worth, wherein we intend to project a desired image to others.

2.    The information discrepancy. We have more access to information about our own effort and/or contribution while we do not have the same exact information about the contribution of others. So, it is expected that most people fall in such misconception about others contribution regardless of their honesty, good nature and/or good faith.

One of the famous quotes for Reid Hoffman, linkedIn founder, is “Even when people are well-intentioned, they tend to overvalue their own contribution and undervalue those of others”.

I have myself tested the aforementioned concept by carrying out an unofficial small investigation about the perception of each department’s own contributions relative to others among different departments’ heads through informal discussion and the observations are amazing. The departments were diversified as (1) Operations, (2) business development, (3) projects control, (4) finance, (5) Supply Chain, (6) HR and personnel affairs. The observations of the natural informal chats show a great variance in the perspective of each department head to his/her contribution relative to others’ contribution. Most of the departments’ heads overvalued their effort and contributions, and some of them extremely did. Ironically, the same observation noticed within the same department as some section heads believe that their contribution to the company’s success much exceeds their colleagues’ contributions who are working in the same department, but in other sections, even if they worked the same working hours. There is always an explanation for this overvaluation such as what “they” see of relative importance of their jobs relative to others. Actually, I do not know how they dare to believe so specially, when their position in the organization hierarchy does not let them fully and exactly aware of what other departments do and achieve.      

This responsibility bias has a ripple effect and it is a major source of failed collaboration, strategic alliances failures, team collapses and finally, projects failures. Unfortunately, the perfect calibration of the 100% sum of contributions estimated by the team members is not achievable in reality, but the gap can be narrowed.

To narrow the gap, the problem of miscommunication should be resolved. These are some of the measures that should be carried:

1.    Role Clarity: clearly defining the “Role” of each department and minimizing repetition of tasks

2.    Communication and information channels should be strong, clear among different departments.

3.    Horizontal communication should be encouraged.

4.    The continual enhancement of the company’s processes and policies to ensure the role clarity and well defined responsibility

5.    The continual awareness of each department role and responsibility and its contribution to the overall company targets.

6.    Spreading the trust culture. As we know, TRUST is the one thing that changes everything regarding productivity, people collaboration and speed of moving towards a shared goal.

7.    Spreading the culture of gratitude and sharing credit. People in the organization should understand that everyone will shine more if other people shines too.

One of the good and active techniques in narrowing the responsibility gap is asking each team member to list others’ contributions before making the estimate of his/her contribution. By doing so, he/she will be indirectly reminded with what others have done and contributed, thus he/she will be more rational and balanced when making their estimate for their contribution relative to others. By doing so, the information gap is between what we know about our effort relative to others are narrowed.

Another imperative technique is spreading “gratitude and sharing the credit” culture. This cannot be genuinely practiced without the real understanding of other’s roles and true information of others’ efforts and contributions.

One may say that self-serving bias may be helpful in protecting our self-esteem and ensuring our rapid climbing of the success ladder. Ok, may be true in the short term, but in the medium and long run, it causes more harm than good. It affects one’s credibility, his reputation, and deprives him/her from the opportunity to improve. Once you get used to it, you lose your ability for seeing reality and addressing problems. You will always be on the lookout for external factors to blame rather seeing your shortcomings to rectify. Finally, it is not ethical to take credit for something that you don't deserve. My last advice is that making a good estimate of your contributions with regard to others is a skill that one should excel at.