, impersonal forces of the market, conspiracies, interrelated and complex factors, and many other combinations. The type of belief that the individual has about causation has implications. It leads to other kinds of beliefs and consequences.
For example, the individual who attributes success in the stock market to blind luck is also likely to attribute failure in the stock market to luck and may fail to take the necessary steps to change the outcome next time. The individual who fixes blame on an individual is likely to spend a great deal of time trying to find out who made the mistake in a crisis, and may fail to deal effectively with the crisis in the meantime.
In addition, if the focus is always on an individual, and the individual as sole cause agent, then it is likely that leaders will never look at the system itself in order to determine how it contributes to certain effects. Messick and Bazerman (1996) note that different systems may create different results and produce different levels of ethical, and unethical, behavior. Thus, changing the system or process within an organization may lead to surprising results in human behavior change.
Theories about other people are also important in thinking about decision making and ethical leadership. This has become more and more apparent during the past several decades with successive waves of struggle regarding the role of African Americans, women, and other minority groups in the workplace. The attempt to focus on diversity as a gift, rather than a problem, depends upon certain basic assumptions about other people.
Problems result when leaders have beliefs about other people, and other groups of people, which lead to intolerance and discrimination. Messick and Bazerman (1996) note that ethnocentrism is one of the major problems leading to unethical decisions. The difficulty with ethnocentrism is that it is so natural and automatic to believe that one's own ways an...