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Foundations of Behavior

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What is challenging about individual behavior in organizations?

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Today’s Agenda

Attitudes Personality Perception Attributions

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Attitudes

Attitudes are evaluative statements – either favorable or unfavorable – concerning objects, people, and events

Attitudes usually have both a cognitive (belief), affective (emotional) and a behavioral component

Example: – An individual’s unfavorable attitude toward firms that engage in

massive pollution might be due to a belief that polluting damages that environment and an emotional feeling that pollution is bad. As a result that person is not likely to work for such a company

Example: – Downsizing: “I think it is going to happen,” “it stresses me out,” “I am

going to start looking for a new job”

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Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Attitudes follow a consistency principle: People seek consistency:

– Among their attitudes, between attitudes and behavior– Inconsistency is uncomfortable

Cognitive dissonance - incompatibility between attitudes, or between attitudes and behavior

– People try to reconcile dissonance by changing attitude / behaviors or by rationalizing

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Job-Related Attitudes & Behaviors

Job satisfaction - employee’s general attitude toward her/his job

Job involvement – how much employee identifies with her/his job– Degree of active participation in the job– Feeling that job performance is important to self-worth

Organizational commitment - employee’s loyalty to, identification with, and involvement in the organization

Organizational citizen behavior (OCB) - discretionary behavior that is not part of the formal job requirements

– Promotes effective functioning of the organization

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Attitudes in Action: The Satisfaction-Productivity Controversy

Is it true that “happy workers are productive workers”?

Research: if job satisfaction does have a positive influence on productivity, it is ______ (on average)

– Causality may even be reversed: productivity __satisfaction.– __________ does affect organizational citizenship and

turnover, and matters more for ______-level jobs.

Recommendation: – ______ focus on helping people be productive – ______ about satisfaction

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Personality

Personality: The unique combination of psychological traits that describe a person.

Why does personality matter?– Predict behavior– Manage behavior– Interact with others

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Big 5 Defined

Extraversion: – The degree to which someone is sociable, talkative, and assertive

Agreeableness: – The degree to which someone is good-natured, cooperative, and trusting

Conscientiousness: – The degree to which someone is responsible, dependable, persistent, and

achievement oriented

Openness to experience: – The degree to which someone is imaginative, artistically sensitive, and intellectual

Neuroticism: – The degree to which someone is tense, nervous, depressed, and insecure

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Emotional Intelligence (EI)

Noncognitive skills, capabilities, and competencies that influence a person’s ability to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures (i.e., a social & emotional version of IQ).

– Self-awareness - aware of what you’re feeling– Self-management - ability to manage one’s emotions and impulses– Self-motivation - persistence in the face of setbacks and failures– Empathy - ability to sense how others are feeling– Social skills - ability to handle the emotions of others

Importance - a complement to the idea of “IQ”– EI related to performance at all organizational levels– Especially important in jobs requiring social interaction– EI can be developed, whereas IQ is fixed

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Locus of Control

Degree to which you believe that you are in control of your own destiny

– People who have external loci believe that luck and chance play a big part in what happens to them

– People have internal Loci luck believe that their actions directly result in their outcomes

Implications for work: – High external: less satisfied, more alienated and less involved in their

jobs

Bad performance review?– Externals: ___________– Internals: ___________

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Machiavellianism

How do you gain and manipulate power– High:

emotional distanceends justify means

Implications for work:– Not necessarily bad– Depends on jobs: bargaining skills, commission based

work

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Self Monitoring

Degree to which one adjusts behavior according to social situations.

– High: Socially adaptable Public v. private self

– Low: “I am who I am”

Implications for work:– Preliminary research suggests that “High” is better in organizations:

more central jobs, more likely to be promoted

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Risk Taking

Describes an individual’s willingness to take chances.

High risk:– Less info and time required to make decisions– Decision accuracy surprisingly unaffected

Implications for work:– Depends on the job: trader v. accountant

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Type A and B Personalities

Type A: – “aggressively involved in a chronic incessant struggle to get more

done in less time and against obstacles”– Impatient, aggressive, achievement oriented, outcome driven, hurried

Type B: – “rarely harried by the desire to obtain a wildly increasing number of

things”– Patient, modest, non-competitive, relaxed

Implications for work:– Type B’s make it to the top despite the fact that A’s are really hard

working because they tend to be more creative, play well with others and rarely trade quality for quantity.

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Perception

Perception – interpretation of the environment – We actively interpret sensory impressions– None of us sees reality; we interpret what we see and call it reality

Perception is influenced by:– Perceiver’s attitudes, personality, experience, expectations. We see

what we’ve seen before, what we’ve been trained to see, what we expect to see. And ignore the reverse.

– Target and situation. We see what is distinctive. Loud, good looking people stand out Time of day, location and other things change what we see

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Attribution Theory

Perceptions and judgments of people

This theory explains how we assign meanings to behavior and causes of behavior of others

Internal explanations – when the behavior is thought to be under the control of the person.

External explanations – when behavior is the result of situational constraints - e.g., chance, rules, custom.

– We assign meanings to our perceptions based on attributions

Example: What would you say if you making Internal/External?– Your boss gives you a big promotion.– Your boss passes you over for promotion and gives it to a colleague

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Internal

External

Attributionof CauseExternal

Internal

External

Internal

Interpretation

Low

High

Low

High

Low

High

Distinctiveness

Consistency

Consensus

Observation

IndividualBehavior

Many or one situation?

Many or one person(s)?

Many or one times?

Lets work through an example: Do you think Jenny is hard to get along with?

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We make systematic errors and show biases in attributions

Fundamental attribution error - tendency to explain behavior of others by:

– overestimating the influence of internal factors– underestimating the influence of external factors

Self-serving bias - – personal success attributed to internal factors– personal failure attributed to external factors

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Judging Others

We use shortcuts to make attributions– Why? Makes perceptual task easier– Its efficient if based on fact, and problematic if not– Knowing how we make shortcuts can help us see when it is flawed

Assumed similarity - Perception of other based on perceived similarities - the other is “like me”

– _______________

Stereotyping – Individual is evaluated based on one’s impressions of the group to which s/he belongs

– ________________

Halo effect - General impression about a person is forged on the basis of a single characteristic

– ________________