ABSTRACT
Individuals regularly seek cause-and-effect information to better understand and control their environments (Perales & Catena, 2006). Useful causal information reveals specific cause-and-effect relationships that are relatively stable across situations (Johnson & Keil, 2014). Leaders operate in especially complex environments and so have a particularly challenging task in obtaining high-quality causal information. Yet causal information has a pervasive influence on the way leaders attempt to influence their environments and, consequently, on leader performance. In this chapter, I describe research bearing on how leaders retrospectively attribute causal explanations (Martinko, Harvey, & Douglas, 2007) and how these attributions influence the development of descriptive mental models (Strange & Mumford, 2013). These models represent leaders’ beliefs about causality in their environments. They also influence prospective causal analysis (Marcy & Mumford, 2010), wherein leaders search for causal information that can be leveraged to achieve their goals. I describe various aspects of prospective causal analysis, including the content of causal information considered and strategies used to apply that information. Prospective causal analysis influences leaders’ formation of prescriptive mental models which serve as the basis for goal-oriented behavior such as planning, forecasting, and vision formation. I also describe several practical implications and suggestions for future research on leader causal analysis.
