Bulldozer00's Blog

Over the years, I’ve read quite a few books and articles on managing the soft side of an organization. In many of these info sources, I’ve seen the term FAE = Fundamental Attribution Error mentioned. The FAE represents the tendency of a manager to instinctively and unthinkingly blame a person’s character and/or work ethic for under-performance. The real cause, which cannot possibly be true in a corpo manager’s conditioned mind, is likely that his/her inability to create, nurture, and continuously sustain a helpful, supportive, learning work environment is killing productivity and creating under-performers.

Of course, the FAE cannot account for all under-performance in an absolute sense. There are self-made underperformers (like BD00) in every org, regardless of the quality of the surrounding work environment.