An essential component of achieving goals and ambitions is witnessing failures, learning from them, and improving upon them. However, self-serving bias can make a person evade failures through reasons and excuses. It can impact the workplace and is detrimental to career and advancement.
Self-serving bias prompts the person taking credit for positive outcomes to blame other factors for failures or negative outcomes. It occurs widely across populations and is influenced by age, culture, clinical diagnosis, and more. This seemingly harmless habit can have significant implications. It is important to identify and curtail this behavior.
If a person cannot attribute their failures to their mistakes, the chances of improvement are low.
Why do we demonstrate self-serving bias?
- People demonstrate a self-serving bias to either maintain or enhance their self-esteem. By attributing successes to actions and failures to external circumstances, they avoid criticism.
- To enhance self-esteem, people try to portray favorable impressions of themselves to others.
- Negative outcomes surprise people; thus, they are more likely to attribute negative outcomes to situational or external factors rather than personal reasons.
- Research states that self-serving bias is most prevalent among young children and older adults.
Impacts of self-serving bias
- If a workplace allows its leaders to act on their self-serving bias, the employees will notice and start demonstrating unhappiness.
- A self-serving employee will be unable to perform their job to their highest potential.
- They can also decrease the morale of their teammates.
- Employees will feel unheard.
A few pointers for organizations to begin with
Create an employee-friendly work culture: Organizations prioritize client needs because business comes through them. However, it is high time organizations create an employee-friendly work culture. It will enhance the client experience.
Reinforce big-picture thinking: Organizations must make employees understand the power of thinking about the big picture. Show them why solutions need to be achieved, keeping in mind the interests of everyone.
Create awareness sessions: Organizations must conduct awareness sessions on the topic of non-conscious bias. It will eventually make employees aware of their biases.
Although self-serving bias may sound like a minor issue, it can disrupt productivity. If an organization is culturally sound, employees will be inclined to take responsibility for their mistakes. Awareness and sensitization sessions will help an organization. Reassessing our reward system is another way to potential curb self-serving bias.
