PART 4: LEADING

CHAPTER 8 - FOUNDATIONS OF INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR

LEARNING OUTCOMES

After reading this chapter students should be able to:

1. Identify the focus and goals of organizational behavior (OB).

2. Explain the role that attitudes play in job performance.

3. Describe different personality theories.

4. Describe perception and the factors that influence it.

5. Discuss learning theories and their relevance in shaping behavior.

6. Discuss contemporary issues in OB.

I. WHAT ARE THE FOCUS AND GOALS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR?

A. Organizational Behavior

1. OB is concerned specifically with the actions of people at work.

2. Addresses some issues that are not obvious, such as informal elements.

B. What Is the Focus of Organizational Behavior?

1. First, OB looks at individual behavior.

a) Psychologists are primary contributors.

b) Includes personality, perception, learning, and motivation.

2. Second, OB is concerned with group behavior.

a) Sociologists and social psychologists are primary contributors.

b) Includes norms, roles, team building, and conflict.

3. Finally, OB looks at organizational aspects including structure, culture, and human resource policies and practices.

C. What Are the Goals of Organizational Behavior?

1. To explain, predict and influence behavior.

2. The manager needs to explain why employees engage in some behaviors rather than others and to predict how employees will respond to various actions by the manager.

3. The emphasis will be on employee productivity, absenteeism, and turnover.

4. Organizational citizenship—a fourth type of behavior becoming important in determining employee performance.

a) Discretionary behavior that's not directly part of an employee’s formal job description.

b) Reflects behaviors that promote the effective functioning of the organization.

c) Examples, helping others on one’s work team, volunteering for extra job activities, avoiding unnecessary conflicts, making constructive statements about one’s work group and the overall organization.

5. Job satisfaction—not a behavior—it’s an attitude.

a) An employee’s attitude may be linked to his or her productivity, absenteeism, and turnover.

6. Workplace misbehavior is any intentional employee behavior that is potentially harmful to the organization or individuals within the organization.

7. Workplace misbehavior shows up in organizations in four ways: deviance, aggression, antisocial behavior, and violence.

II. WHAT ROLE DO ATTITUDES PLAY IN JOB PERFORMANCE?

1. Attitudes are evaluative statements—favorable or unfavorable—concerning objects, people, or events.

a) They reflect how an individual feels about something.

B. What Are The Three Components of an Attitude?

1. An attitude is made up of three components: cognitive, affective, and behavioral.

C. What Attitudes Might Employees Hold?

1. The cognitive component consists of a person’s beliefs, opinions, knowledge, and information held by a person.

2. The affective component of an attitude is the emotional, or feeling, segment of an attitude.

a) Cognition and affect can lead to behavioral outcomes.

3. The behavioral component of an attitude refers to an intention to behave in a certain way.

4. The three most important job-related attitudes are job involvement, organizational commitment and employee engagement.

a) Job involvement is the degree to which an employee identifies with his or her job, actively participates in it, and considers job performance important to his or her self-worth.

b) Organizational commitment represents an employee’s orientation toward the organization in terms of his or her loyalty to, identification with, and involvement in the organization.

c) Employee engagement, which is when employees are connected to, satisfied with, and enthusiastic about their jobs.

D. Do an Individual’s Attitude and Behavior Need to be Consistent?

1. People change what they say so that it doesn’t contradict what they do.

2. People seek consistency among their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior.

3. Individuals try to reconcile differing attitudes and align their attitudes and behavior so that they appear rational and consistent.

E. What Is Cognitive Dissonance Theory?

1. Leon Festinger, in the late 1950s, proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance.

2. This theory sought to explain the relationship between attitudes and behavior.

a) Dissonance in this case means inconsistency.

b) Cognitive dissonance refers to any incompatibility that an individual might perceive between attitudes or between his or her behavior and attitudes.

3. Festinger argued that any form of inconsistency is uncomfortable and that individuals will attempt to reduce the dissonance and the discomfort.

4. Festinger proposed that the desire to reduce dissonance is determined by:

a) the importance of the elements creating the dissonance.

b) the degree of influence the individual believes he or she has over the elements.

c) the rewards that may be involved.

5. Examples

a) The factors creating the dissonance are relatively unimportant and the resulting pressure to correct the imbalance would be low.

(1) Case of corporate manager—Tracey Ford .

b) The degree of influence that individuals believe they have over the elements also will have an impact on how they will react to the dissonance.

(1) If they perceive the dissonance to be uncontrollable, they are less likely to feel a need for an attitude change.

(2) If the dissonance-producing behaviors were required by the boss’s directive, the pressure to reduce dissonance would be less than if the behavior were performed voluntarily.

6. These moderating factors suggest that just because individuals experience dissonance, they will not necessarily move directly toward reduction of the dissonance.

7. Rewards also influence the degree to which individuals are motivated to reduce dissonance.

a) High dissonance, when accompanied by high rewards, tends to reduce the tension inherent in the dissonance.

8. Just because individuals experience dissonance, they will not necessarily move toward consistency—toward reduction of the dissonance.

a) The individual will not be under great tension to reduce the dissonance if:

(1) The issues underlying the dissonance are of minimal importance.

(2) An individual perceives that the dissonance is externally imposed and is substantially uncontrollable.

(3) Rewards are significant enough to offset the dissonance.

F. How Can an Understanding of Attitudes Help Managers Be More Effective?

1. There is relatively strong evidence that committed and satisfied employees have low rates of turnover and absenteeism.

2. Managers should do those things that generate positive job attitudes and manage dissonance.

a) The pressure to reduce the dissonance is lessened when the employee perceives that the dissonance is externally imposed and uncontrollable.

b) The pressure is also lessened if rewards are significant enough to offset the dissonance.

3. But, are happy workers more productive?

4. Past research studies suggested that satisfied employees were highly productive.

a) In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, management did things that would create a “caring” environment.

5. But their effect on productivity was questioned.

6. Most researchers perceived that managers would get better results by directing their attention primarily to what would help employees become more productive.

a) Successful job performance should then lead to feelings of accomplishment, increased verbal recognition, increased pay and promotions opportunities, and other rewards—all desirable outcomes—which then lead to satisfaction with the job.

III. WHAT DO MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PERSONALITY?

A. Introduction

1. An individual’s personality is a unique combination of emotional, thought, and behavioral patterns that affect how a person reacts to situations and interacts with others.

B. Can Personality Predict Behavior?

1. An individual’s personality is the combination of the psychological traits that characterize a person.

2. Researchers attempted to focus specifically on which traits identify sources of one’s personality.

3. Two widely recognized efforts.

a) The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

b) The Big Five model of personality.

4. What is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?

a) One of the more widely used methods of identifying personalities.

b) Uses four dimensions of personality to identify 16 different personality types based on the responses to an approximately 100-item questionnaire.

(1) More than 2 million individuals each year in the United States alone take the MBTI.

c) The sixteen personality types are based four dimensions.

d) Extroversion versus introversion (EI).

(1) The EI dimension measures an individual’s orientation toward the inner world of ideas (I) or the external world of the environment (E).

e) Sensing versus intuitive (SN).

(1) The sensing-intuitive dimension indicates an individual’s reliance on information gathered from the external world (S) or from the world of ideas (N).

f) Thinking versus feeling (TF).

(1) Thinking-feeling reflects one’s preference for evaluating information in an analytical manner (T) or on the basis of values and beliefs (F).

g) Judging versus perceiving (JP).

(1) Judging-perceiving index reflects an attitude toward the external world that is either task completion oriented (J) or information seeking (P).

h) Proponents of the instrument believe that personality types influence the way people interact and solve problems.

5. What is the Big Five model of personality?

a) The Big Five factors are:

(1) Extroversion—the degree to which someone is sociable, talkative, and assertive.

(2) Agreeableness—the degree to which someone is good-natured, cooperative, and trusting.

(3) Conscientiousness—the degree to which someone is responsible, dependable, persistent, and achievement oriented.

(4) Emotional stability—the degree to which someone is calm, enthusiastic, and secure (positive), or tense, nervous, depressed, and insecure (negative).

(5) Openness to experience—the degree to which someone is imaginative, artistically sensitive, and intellectual.

b) Research has shown important relationships between these dimensions and job performance.

(1) One study reviewed five categories of occupations: professionals, managers, sales, and semiskilled and skilled employees.

(2) Job performance was defined in terms of employee performance ratings, training competency, and personnel data such as salary level.

(3) The results of the study showed that conscientiousness predicted job performance for all five occupational groups.

(4) Predictions for the other personality dimensions depended on the situation and the occupational group.

(a) Extroversion predicted performance in managerial and sales positions.

(b) Openness to experience was found to be important in predicting training competency.

(c) Emotional security was not positively related to job performance.

6. What is emotional intelligence?

a) According to underlying research on emotional intelligence, people who understand their own emotions and are good at reading others’ emotions may be more effective in their jobs.

b) Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to an assortment of noncognitive skills, capabilities, and competencies that influence a person’s ability to cope with environmental demands and pressures.

c) EI is composed of five dimensions.

(1) Self-awareness—being aware of what you’re feeling;

(2) Self-management—the ability to manage your own emotions and impulses;

(3) Self-motivation—the ability to persist in the face of setbacks and failures;

(4) Empathy—the ability to sense how others are feeling;

(5) Social skills—the ability to handle the emotions of others.

d) Several studies suggest EI may play an important role in job performance.

(1) One study looked at the characteristics of Bell Lab engineers rated as stars by their peers.

(a) Scientists concluded it was EI, not academic IQ, that characterized high performers.

(2) A second study of Air Force recruiters generated similar findings—top performing recruiters exhibited high levels of EI.

(3) Examples, Air Force, American Express, Cooperative Printing in Minneapolis.

e) 56 percent of human resources managers felt that EI was very important or moderately important to career advancement.

C. Can Personality Traits Predict Practical Work-Related Behaviors?

1. Five personality traits have proven most powerful in explaining individual behavior in organizations.

2. Locus of control.

a) Who has control over an individual’s behavior?

b) An internal locus of control—people believe that they control their fate.

(1) Internals explain a performance evaluation in terms of their own action.

c) An external locus of control—people believe that their lives are controlled by outside forces.

(1) Externals blame a poor performance evaluation on events outside their control (e.g., their boss’s prejudice, their coworkers, etc.).

3. Machiavellianism (“Mach”).

a) Named after Niccolo Machiavelli who provided instruction in the 16th century on how to gain and manipulate power.

b) A high “Mach” is pragmatic, maintains emotional distance, believes that ends can justify means, and is found to have beliefs that are less ethical.

c) “If it works, use it” is consistent with a high Mach perspective.

d) High Machs are productive in jobs that require bargaining skills or that have substantial rewards for winning.

4. Self-esteem (SE).

a) People differ in the degree to which they like or dislike themselves.

b) Research suggests that self-esteem is directly related to expectations for success.

(1) High SEs believe that they possess the ability to succeed at work, take more risks in job selection, and are more likely to choose unconventional jobs.

c) Low SEs are more susceptible to external influence than are high SEs.

(1) In managerial positions, low SEs will tend to be concerned with pleasing others and be less likely to take unpopular stands.

d) Relationship to job satisfaction—high SEs are more satisfied with their jobs.

5. Self-monitoring.

a) An individual’s ability to adjust his or her behavior to external, situational factors.

b) Individuals high in self-monitoring can show considerable adaptability.

c) They are highly sensitive to external cues and can behave differently in different situations.

(1) High self-monitors are capable of presenting striking contradictions between their public persona and their private selves.

d) Low self-monitors are behaviorally consistent between who they are and what they do.

e) High self-monitors pay closer attention to the behavior of others and are more capable of conforming, which might help them be more successful in managerial positions that require multiple, even contradicting, roles.

6. Propensity for risk taking.

a) This preference to assume or avoid risk impacts how long it takes individuals to make a decision and how much information they require.

b) In one classic study, high-risk-taking managers made more rapid decisions and used less information in making their choices than did the low-risk-taking managers.

(1) Decision accuracy was the same for both groups.

c) It is generally correct to conclude that managers in organizations are risk-aversive.

D. It makes sense to recognize that there are individual differences on propensity for being risk-aversive and to consider aligning risk-taking propensity with specific job demands.

E. How Do We Match Personalities and Jobs?

1. Efforts have been made to match the proper personalities with the proper jobs.

2. The best-documented personality-job fit theory by psychologist John Holland states that an employee’s satisfaction with the job, as well as the propensity to leave that job, depends on the degree to which the individual’s personality matches his or her occupational environment.

3. Holland identified six basic personality types.

4. The theory argues that satisfaction is highest and turnover lowest when personality and occupation match.

5. Three key points of Holland’s model.

a) There do appear to be intrinsic differences in personality among individuals;

b) There are different types of jobs; and,

c) People in job environments congruent with their personality types should be more satisfied and less likely to resign voluntarily than should people in incongruent jobs.

F. Do Personality Attributes Differ Across Cultures?

1. There certainly are no dominant personality types for a given country.

2. Yet a country’s culture should influence the dominant personality characteristics of its population.

3. Example, locus of control.

a) North Americans believe that they can dominate their environment.

b) Those in Middle Eastern countries believe that life is essentially pre-determined.

G. How Can an Understanding of Personality Help Managers Be More Effective?

1. Over 62 percent of companies are using personality tests when recruiting and hiring.

a) Managers are likely to have higher-performing and more-satisfied employees if consideration is given to matching personalities with jobs.

IV. WHAT IS PERCEPTION AND WHAT INFLUENCES IT?

A. Defined

1. Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.

2. Research demonstrates that individuals may look at the same thing yet perceive it differently.

a) None of us actually sees reality.

b) We interpret what we see and call it reality.

c) We act according to our perceptions.

B. What Influences Perception?

1. A number of factors operate to shape and sometimes distort perception.

2. They reside in the perceiver, in the object or target being perceived, or in the context of the situation in which the perception is made.

3. The individual’s personal characteristics will heavily influence the interpretation.

a) His or her attitudes, personality, motives, interests, past experiences, and expectations.

4. Targets are not looked at in isolation; background also influences perception as does our tendency to group close things and similar things together.

5. The context in which we see objects or events is also important.

a) Time of perception as well as location, lighting, temperature, and other situational factors can influence attention.

C. How Do Managers Judge Employees?

1. Much of the research on perception is directed at inanimate objects.

2. Our perceptions of people differ from our perceptions of inanimate objects because we make inferences about the actions of people that we don’t make about inanimate objects.

3. When we observe people, we attempt to develop explanations of why they behave in certain ways.

4. These assumptions have led researchers to develop attribution theory.

5. What is attribution theory?

a) Proposed to develop explanations of how we judge people differently depending on what meaning we attribute to a given behavior.

b) Suggests that when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused.

(1) Internally caused behaviors are under individual control.

(2) Externally caused behavior results from outside causes.

6. That determination of whether an individual’s behavior is internally or externally caused depends on three factors: distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency.

a) Distinctiveness—whether an individual displays a behavior in many situations or just one.

(1) What we want to know is whether this behavior is unusual.

(2) If it is unusual, the observer likely gives the behavior an external attribution.

(3) If this action is not unique, it will probably be judged as internal.

b) Everyone faced with a similar situation responds in the same way, we say the behavior shows consensus.

(1) If consensus is high, an external attribution is often assumed.

(2) If not, the reason would be internal.

c) A manager looks for consistency in an employee’s actions.

(1) Does the individual engage in the behaviors regularly and consistently?

(2) The more consistent the behavior, the more inclination to attribute it to internal causes.

7. Can attributions be distorted?

a) Errors or biases distort attributions.

b) When we make judgments about the behavior of other people, we have a tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal or personal factors.

(1) This is the fundamental attribution error.

(2) Can explain why a sales manager may be prone to attribute the poor performance of the sales agents to laziness rather than to the innovative product line introduced by a competitor.

c) There is also a tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors such as ability or effort, while putting the blame for failure on external factors such as luck.

(1) This is called the self-serving bias.

(2) Suggests that feedback provided to employees in performance reviews will be predictably distorted by them, whether it is positive or negative.

D. How Can an Understanding of Perceptions Help Managers Be More Effective?

1. Managers need to recognize that their employees react to perceptions, not to reality.

a) Whether a manager’s appraisal of an employee is actually objective and unbiased or whether the organization’s wage levels are actually among the highest in the industry is less relevant than what employees perceive.

b) Employees behave as if the conditions they perceive actually exist.

2. Managers should pay close attention to how employees perceive both their jobs and management practices.

3. Managers use a number of shortcuts to judge others.

4. Individuals develop techniques for making the perceiving and interpreting of what others do more manageable.

5. These techniques are frequently valuable—allow us to make accurate perceptions rapidly and provide valid data for making predictions.

6. These techniques are not foolproof—they can and do get us into trouble.

a) To understand the distortions, see Managing Diversity - All About Shortcuts.

7. Individuals cannot assimilate all they observe, so they are selective, they 'speed read'.

8. Assumed similarity. It is easy to judge others if we assume that they are similar to us, the 'like me' effect.

9. Stereotyping—we judge someone on the basis of our perception of a group to which he or she belongs.

a) When stereotypes have no foundation, they distort judgments.

10. The halo effect—forming a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic such as intelligence, sociability, or appearance.

V. HOW DO LEARNING THEORIES EXPLAIN BEHAVIOR?

A. Defined

1. The average person's view—“it’s what we did when we went to school.”

2. A psychologist’s definition of learning is any relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience.

3. Two popular theories—operant conditioning and social learning theory.

B. What Is Operant Conditioning?

1. Behavior is a function of its consequences.

2. People behave to get something they want or to avoid something they don’t want.

a) Operant behavior is voluntary or learned rather than reflexive or unlearned behavior.

b) Reinforcement strengthens a behavior and increases the likelihood that it will be repeated.

3. Building on earlier work, B. F. Skinner expanded our knowledge of operant conditioning.

a) Behavior is assumed to be determined from without (learned).

b) Causing pleasing consequences to follow a specific form of behavior will increase the frequency of that behavior.

c) Rewards are most effective if they immediately follow the desired response.

d) Behavior that is not rewarded, or is punished, is less likely to be repeated.

4. Any situation in which it is either explicitly stated or implicitly suggested that reinforcements are contingent on some action on your part involves operant learning.

5. If a behavior fails to be positively reinforced, the probability that the behavior will be repeated declines.

C. What Is Social Learning Theory?

1. Learning through both observation and direct experience is social learning theory.

2. Social learning is an extension of operant conditioning. It assumes that behavior is a function of consequences, but it also acknowledges the existence of observational learning and the importance of perception in learning.

3. People respond to how they perceive and define consequences, not to the objective consequences themselves.

4. The influence of models is central to the social learning viewpoint.

5. Four processes determine the influence that a model will have on an individual.

a) Attentional processes—people learn when they recognize and pay attention to a model’s critical features.

b) Retention processes—a model’s influence depends on how well the individual remembers the model’s action.

c) Motor reproduction processes—the watching must be converted to doing.

D. Reinforcement processes—individuals will be motivated to exhibit the modeled behavior if positive incentives or rewards are provided.

E. How Can Managers Shape Behavior?

1. Managers should be concerned with how they can teach employees to behave in ways that most benefit the organization.

2. Managers often attempt to mold individuals by guiding their learning in graduated steps.

a) This is shaping behavior. (See Developing Your Skill at Shaping Behavior.)

3. We shape behavior by systematically reinforcing each successive step that moves the individual closer to the desired response.

4. There are four ways in which to shape behavior.

a) Positive reinforcement—when a response is followed with something pleasant.

b) Negative reinforcement—rewarding a response with the termination or withdrawal of something pleasant.

c) Punishment—penalizes undesirable behavior.

d) Extinction—eliminating any reinforcement that is maintaining a behavior.

5. Both positive and negative reinforcement result in learning; they strengthen a desired response and increase the probability of repetition.

6. Both punishment and extinction also result in learning; however, they weaken behavior and tend to decrease its subsequent frequency.

F. How Can an Understanding of Learning Help Managers Be More Effective?

1. Employees must continually learn on the job.

a) Managers need to decide whether they are going to let employee learning occur randomly or whether they are going to manage learning through rewards they allocate and examples they set.

VI. WHAT CONTEMPROARY ISSUES DO OB MANAGERS FACE?

A. Introduction

1. It is clear at this point that managers need to understand how and why employees behave the way they do.

B. How Do Generational Differences Affect the Workplace?

1. Generation Y, are 70 million people who are embarking on their careers, taking their an increasingly multigenerational workplace.

2. Gen Y comprises those individuals born from about 1982 to 1997.

3. They’re very independent and tech savvy.

4. Managerial challenges include:

a) appropriate office attire

b) technology - they have grown up with it vs. their older colleagues in the workplace.

c) they want bosses who are open minded; experts in their field; organized; teachers, trainers, and mentors; not authoritarian or paternalistic; respectful of their generation; understanding of their need for work/life balance; providing constant feedback; communicating in vivid and compelling ways; and providing stimulating and novel learning experiences.

5. Managers, have to recognize and understand the behaviors of this group in order to create an environment in which work can be accomplished efficiently, effectively, and without disruptive conflict.

C. How do Managers Deal With Negative behavior in the Workplace?

1. Rudeness, hostility, aggression, and other forms of workplace negativity have become all too common in today’s organizations.

2. In a US research study 10% of employees said they witnessed rudeness daily within their workplaces and 20 percent said that they personally were direct targets of incivility at work at least once a week.

3. Managers cannot ignore the behavior.

4. Preventing negative behaviors by carefully screening potential employees for certain personality traits and responding immediately and decisively to unacceptable negative behaviors can go a long way toward managing negative workplace behaviors.

CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTION

1. How is an organization like an iceberg? Use the iceberg metaphor to describe the field of organizational behavior.

2. Does the importance of knowledge of OB differ based on a manager’s level in the organization? If so, how? If not, why not? Be specific.

3. Clarify how individuals reconcile inconsistencies between attitudes and behaviors.

4. Describe what is meant by the term emotional intelligence. Provide an example of how it’s used in contemporary organizations.

5. “Instead of worrying about job satisfaction, companies should be trying to create environments where performance is enabled.” What do you think this statement means? Explain. What’s your reaction to this statement? Do you agree? Disagree? Why?

6. How might a manager use personality traits to improve employee selection in his department? Emotional intelligence? Discuss.

7. Describe the implications of social learning theory for managing people at work.

8. A Gallup Organization survey shows that most workers rate having a caring boss even higher than they value money or fringe benefits. How should managers interpret this information? What are the implications?

.

9. Write down three attitudes you have. Identify the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of those attitudes.