Emergence of Organizational Attributions: The Role of a Shared Cognitive Schema

Abstract

Daft and Weick (1984) suggest that individual-level interpretations of top strategic managers can be expected to converge into an organizational interpretation because managers use identical cognitive schemata when making their personal interpretations. The primary purpose of this paper is to adapt the well-accepted interpersonal attribution schema to an organizational context to determine whether Daft and Weick's convergence argument is plausible. We conclude that the common phenomena of informational equivocality and bias make the existence of shared schemata a necessary but not sufficient condition for the convergence of interpretations. Therefore, studies in the organizational literature which rely on the convergence argument fail to sufficiently establish a linkage between individual cognition and organizational action.