Johanna Murray, a climate campaigner at The National Footprint Foundation, is known in her organization to be a campaigner of caliber and high performance. She recently worked on a campaign against global warming during which she worked extremely hard to achieve project milestones. However, the campaign failed as it could not achieve the desired objective. Due to this, her manager, Brenda Owens, gave her a poor performance appraisal. In the appraisal, Brenda said that Johanna was not motivated and failed to reach out to 25,000 people through Internet media to spread awareness about climate change. Which of the following, if true, weakens Brenda's statement?

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Individuals and organizations tend to attribute their own successes to internal factors such as ability or effort and place the blame for failure on external factors such as bad luck or unproductive co-workers. This is known as a self-serving bias. If Brenda were unable to make time for Johanna to brief her on the tasks involved in carrying out the campaign's media strategy, then this weakens the argument because it shows that it was not entirely Johanna's fault and that Brenda is partly to blame. If Johanna lacks experience in publicizing campaigns using Internet media, it strengthens Brenda's statement. The fact that Johanna recently moved from the agriculture campaign to the climate campaign and that Johanna's previous job involved an extensive amount of researching on environmental issues is irrelevant to Brenda's argument. Brenda's argument is strengthened if she is known to be a fair and unbiased manager because it indicates that her evaluation of Johanna is most likely true.

Johanna Murray, a Climate Campaigner at the National Footprint Foundation