it's not my fault

Journal of Applied Psychology
2004, Vol. 89, No. 2, 279 –292

Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association
0021-9010/04/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.89.2.279

“It’s Not My Fault—But Only I Can Change It”: Counterfactual and
Prefactual Thoughts of Managers
Martin Goerke and Jens Moller
¨

Stefan Schulz-Hardt

University of Bielefeld

Technical University Dresden

Uwe Napiersky

Dieter Frey

University of Bielefeld

Ludwig Maximilian University

In testing for the self-serving bias in performance evaluation, the authors propose that comparing managers’ counterfactual and prefactual thoughts about subordinates’ performance is more conclusive than the attributional approach and also offers practical advantages. In a study with 120 managers, a
4-way interaction of subordinate performance, temporal perspective, direction, and reference confirmed the predicted pattern. Managers’ thoughts about how a weak performance could have been enhanced had external references, but thoughts about how such a performance could be enhanced in the future focused on the leader. This asymmetry was only observed for weak performance. Results are discussed with regard to biases in leaders’ performance evaluations and to how counter- and prefactual thoughts could be used for leadership research and practice.

ior. Representatives of the former line of research include Lord and his colleagues (e.g., Lord & Smith, 1983). Their findings indicate that subordinates’ attributions of their superiors’ behavior influenced both their attitudes and their behavior toward the superiors, even though the attributions were in part derived from incorrect or oversimplified assumptions. Within the second research tradition,
Green and Mitchell (1979) introduced an early model of attributional processes in leader–subordinate interactions. According to this model, leaders’ attributions are based on the observed behavior of a subordinate, and in turn form the

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