Success Attributions

It is known that success has many fathers. For the guiding process ‘team preservation’, much depends on this ‘creator choice’. At the same time, particularly here, the motivation paradox has a very pronounced effect. This creates a recipe-free environment, in which especially mindful management work must be carried out.

If one regards the employee perspective, then the catchwords ‘success’ and ‘career’ are closely linked. Success attributions foster career opportunities and those who wish to make a career, must claim success for themselves. For this reason, alone, team members easily enter into competition with each other, as it is still more popular (because it is more controllable) to attribute success to individuals rather than to several people or even to a whole team. Only rarely do teams apply for vacancies…

For the team, as a group, it is important to have shared successes, because it also has shared tasks. Without explicit team success it will become, over the long term, hollow talk, if one then still speaks of shared tasks. Then the preservation of team motivation becomes more fragile. However, if the team is identified with successes, which individual team members clearly see as their own achievement, then the motivation falls just as quickly.

These short comments should outline the challenges in dealing with success. The choice between balance and clear focus and the interaction with envy, distrust, jealousy, competition, esteem, equality, fairness and also the action of highlighting and selling success must be seen as the regulatory task of the entire team, never only as that of the leader, alone. Otherwise, failure is pre-programmed.