The downside of decision delegation: When transferring decision responsibility incurs interpersonal costs

Hayley Blunden and Mary Steffel

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2023, vol. 176, issue C

Abstract: When facing decisions, managers and employees often seek coworker support. They may ask for advice, retaining decision responsibility, or delegate, transferring decision responsibility. Prior work shows that people who seek decision support via delegation expect to avoid the burdens of decision responsibility, like regret and blame. But might these anticipated benefits sometimes come at an interpersonal cost? Drawing from fairness theory, we hypothesize and find that decision support providers often respond to delegators (versus advice seekers) with reduced willingness to help them with future decisions or hire them, perceiving those seeking to offload decision responsibility as less fair. This interpersonal penalization is attenuated when the potential for perceived unfairness is reduced: when decision responsibility transfer is perceived as less likely to make the support provider worse off (when the decision involves allocating desirable outcomes to others) or more legitimate (when the decision lies within the scope of the helper’s role).

Keywords: Advice; Delegation; Decision support; Impression management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597823000262
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:176:y:2023:i:c:s0749597823000262

DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2023.104251

Access Statistics for this article

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes is currently edited by John M. Schaubroeck

More articles in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().