Attribution scholarship to date has endeavoured to gain insights into employees’ human resource attributions, or beliefs about managerial motives, to explain individual behaviors at work. However, this approach has chiefly focused on a neutral situation and a transitory state of cognitive psychology, rather than a specific circumstance and long-term motivational process. We therefore may lack an understanding of how employees react to an important event and how these affective responses inform their behavior, expectancy, and performance in the future. Intrigued by this idea, the current study examines employees’ causal ascriptions of success or interpretations of why they and others around them progress and succeed. By utilising signalling and attribution perspectives, we build and test an integrative model around this core concept by which high-performance work systems, leader-member exchange and organizational cynicism work together to shape employees’ causal ascriptions of success. These reasonings, in turn, have a significant bearing on their organizational citizenship behaviors. The findings indicate that the stream of thought flowing from internal causes (nested within attributors rather than organization) is likely to spark positive dynamics of feelings and volitional momentum that set a scene for employees to act proactively at work. Based on a sample of 108 teams of Vietnamese small and medium sized enterprises, and multilevel structural equation modelling with Mplus, we found broad support for our hypotheses and thereby provide implications for both researchers and practitioners.
