Page 16 - Make Work Great

Prologue

There’s more. Not only are your workplace actions strongly driven
by your role set, but your workplace satisfaction is heavily dependent
upon it too. The question of whether your role set is sending you
expectations that are commensurate with, or opposite from, your
own internal guidance, is critical to that satisfaction. You are prob-
ably inclined to believe that, should you receive external direction
that is inconsistent with your own sense of what is appropriate or cor-
rect, you will “stay true to yourself.” But more often than not, such a
mismatch will result not in your failure to comply with expectations
but rather in your compliance with them despite mounting discomfort
and internal confl ict. 7
In short, your role set can cause you to act predictably and in ways
you would never choose otherwise. You may have the fi nal vote as to
what you do, but you are not the only driving force. Sometimes, you
aren’t even the strongest force.

We Make the Fundamental Attribution Error
What could be worse than learning that peer pressure, pressure from
authority fi gures, and pressure from our role set all act to defi ne and
change both our perceptions and our actions? How about learning
that we tend to be blind to the roles of all three?
As it turns out, despite our best intentions, we systematically dis-
count the power of context to drive our actions. Even in seemingly
obvious scenarios, we tend to overestimate the role of the individual
and underestimate the role of the situation. This tendency was sum-
marized well by James Surowiecki in an article in The New Yorker:

People are generally bad at accepting the importance of context
. . . We fall prey to what the social psychologist Lee Ross called
“the fundamental attribution error”—the tendency to ascribe suc-
cess or failure to innate characteristics, even when the context is
overwhelmingly important. In one classic demonstration, people
shown a person shooting a basketball in a gym with poor lighting
and another person shooting a basketball in a gym with excellent

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