Chapter 2
Foundation of Individual
Behavior
goals
• 1. List the dominant values in today’s
workforce
• 2. Describe the relationship between
satisfaction and productivity
• 3. Explain the theory of cognitive dissonance
• 4. Summarize the relationship between
attitude and behavior
• 5. Explain how two people can see the same
thing and interpret it differently
• 6. Summarize attribution theory
A—Personality
• Our personality shape our behavior.
• Why are some people quiet and passive,
while others are loud and aggressive?
• Are certain personality types better
adapted than others for certain job types?
Defining Personality
• Gordon Allport :
• Personality is the dynamic organization
within the individual of those
psychophysical systems that determine his
unique adjustments to his environment.
• Personality is the sum total of ways in
which an individual reacts to and interacts
with others.
Personality Determinants
• Heredity
– Physical stature
– Facial attractiveness
– Gender
– Temperament
– Muscle composition and reflexes
– Energy level
– Biological rhythms
• Environment
Personality traits（人格特质）
• Enduring characteristics:
– Shy
– Aggressive
– Submissive
– Lazy
– Ambitious
– Loyal
– timid
The Myers- Briggs Type Indicator
迈尔斯-布里格斯类型指标（MBTI）
• MBTI is the most widely used personalityassessment instrument in the world.
• Extroverted / Introverted (外向/内向型)E/I
• Sensing / Intuitive (领悟/直觉型)S/N
• Thinking / Feeling (思维/情感型)T/F
• Judging / Perceiving (判断/感知型)J/P
• These classifications together describe 16
personality types.
• http://www.apesk.com/mbti/dati.asp
The Big Five Personality Model
• Extraversion （外倾性）
– Extraverts: gregarious, assertive, sociable
– Introverts: reserved, timid, queit
• Agreeableness （随和性）
– High: cooperative, warm, trusting
– Low: cold, disagreeable, antagonistic
• Conscientiousness （责任心）
– High: responsible, organized, dependable,
persistent
– Low: easily distracted, disorganized, unreliable
• Emotional stability （情绪稳定性）
– Positive: calm, self-confident, secure
– Negative: nervous, anxious, depressed, insecure
• Openness to experience （经验的开放性）
– High: creative, curious, artistically sensitive
– Low: conventional, find comfort in familiar
Type A Personality（A型人格）
• Type A’s:
• 1. are always moving, walking, and eating
rapidly;
• 2. feel impatient with the rate at which most
events take place;
• 3. strive to think or do two or more things at
once,
• 4. cannot cope with leisure time;
• 5. are obsesses with numbers, measuring their
success in term of how many or how much of
everything they acquire.
• Type A’s operate under moderate to high
level of stress.
• Type A’s do better than Type B’s in job
interviews.
Self- monitoring(自我监控）
• Self- monitoring refers to an individual’s
ability to adjust his or her behavior to
external, situational factors.
• High self-monitors are highly sensitive to
external cues and can behave differently
in different situations.
• They are capable of presenting striking
contradictions between their public
persona and their private self.
B—Values
• Values----basic convictions
• “A specific mode of conduct or end-state of
existence is personality or socially
preferable to an opposite or converse
mode of conduct end-state of existence”.
• Values have both content and intensity
attributes.
• Content----important
• Intensity----how important
• Value system represent a prioritizing of
individual values.
• All of us have a hierarchy or values that
forms our value system.
• They’re identified by the relative
importance an individual assigns to values
such as freedom, pleasure, self-respect,
honesty, obedience, and equality.
Type of values
• Rokeach value survey(罗克奇价值观调查)
• Terminal values（终极价值观）- refers to
desirable end-states of existence. These
are the goals that a person would like to
achieve during his or her lifetime.
• Instrumental values（工具价值观）refers to preferable modes of behavior, or
means or achieving the terminal values.
Terminal values
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Instrumental Values
A comfortable life
Ambitious
A sense of accomplishment Capable
A world of peace
Cheerful
A world of beauty
Clean
Equality
Courageous
Family security
Helpful
Happiness
Honest
Inner harmony
Imaginative
Pleasure
Logical
Salvation
Obedient
Social recognition
Polite
True friendiship
Responsible
• Contemporary Work Cohorts
• (当代工作群体)
Cohort
Entered the
workface
Approximate
Current Age
Veterans 1950s or
70 +
退伍军人）early
1960s
Boomers 1965-1985 45 - 60+
婴儿潮一
代
Xers
1985-2000 30 - 45
X世代
Nexters 2000 to
下一世代 present
30
Dominate work values
Hard working, conforming,
conservation,
loyalty to the organization,
Success, achievement,
ambition, dislike of authority,
loyalty to career
Work/like balance, teamoriented, dislike of rule, loyalty
to relationships
Confident, financial success,
self-reliant but team- oriented,
loyalty to both self and R
Values Across Cultures
• A Framework for Assessing Cultures
• 1970s Geert Hofstede
• Five value dimensions of national culture
•
•
•
•
•
Power distance
Individualism vs. collectivism
Quantity of life vs. quality or life
Uncertainty avoidance 不确定性规避
Long- term vs. short- term orientation
• Not all OB theories and concepts are
universally applicable to managing people
around the world.
• You should take into consideration cultural
values when trying to understand the
behavior of people in different countries.
C — Attitudes
• Attitudes are evaluative statements ---either favorable or unfavorable ---concerning objects, people, or events.
• Researchers have assumed that attitudes
have three components:
• cognition, affect, and behavior.
• Viewing attitudes as being made up of three
components ---- cognition, affect and
behavior---- is helpful in understanding their
complexity and the potential relationship
between attitudes and behavior.
• These components are closely related, and
cognition and affect in particular are
inseparable in many ways.
• Does behavior always follow from
attitudes?
• Early---- behavior follow attitudes
• In the late 1960s---- attitude follow behavior
• Leon Festinger 1950s
• Cognitive dissonance (认知失调)
• Cognitive dissonance refers to any
incompatibility an individual might perceive
between two or more attitudes or between
behavior and attitudes.
• The theory of cognitive dissonance
suggests that people seek to minimize
dissonance and the discomfort it causes.
• A person’s desire to reduce dissonance, is
determined by
• (1) the importance of the elements
creating the dissonance,
• (2) the degree of influence the individual
believes he or she has over the elements,
• and (3) the rewards that may be involved
in dissonance.
• Path:
• A: change you behavior
• B: conclude that the dissonant behavior is
not so important
• C: change you attitude
• D: seek out more consonant elements to
outweigh the dissonant ones
• The degree of influence that individuals
believe they over the elements will have
an impact on how they will react to the
dissonance.
• Rewards also influence the degree to
which individuals are motivated to reduce
dissonance.
• Organizational implications:
• The theory of cognitive dissonance can
help to predict the propensity to engage in
both attitude and behavior change.
• The attitude/ behavior relationship:
• Moderating Variables（调节变量）
– The importance of the attitude
– Its correspondence to behavior
– Its accessibility
– Whether there exist social pressures
– Whether a person has direct experience
with the attitude
• Self-perception theory（自我知觉理论）
the major job-related attitudes
• Job satisfaction（工作满意度）
• Job involvement（工作参与度）
• Organizational commitment
•
（组织承诺）
• Job satisfaction
• Job satisfaction refers to an individual’s
general attitude toward his or her job.
• Determines :
– Mentally challenging work (moderate)
– Equitable rewards
– Supportive working conditions
– Supportive colleagues
– tangible
• Job involvement measures the degree to
which people identify psychologically with
their job and consider their perceived
performance level important to self-worth.
• Psychological empowerment（心理授权）
is employees’ beliefs in the degree to which
they influence their work environment, their
competence, the meaningfulness or their job,
and the perceived autonomy in their work.
• Organizational Commitment（组织参与度）
• An employee identifies with a particular
organization and its goals and wishes to
maintain memberships in the organization.
• High organizational commitment means
identifying with your employing organization.
– Affective commitment（情感承诺）
– Continuance commitment（持续承诺）
– Normative commitment（规范承诺）
Satisfaction and Productivity
• Are satisfied workers more productive than
dissatisfied workers?
• Early: a happy worker is a productive worker
• ?
• 1980s: that effect is fairly small
• We would conclude that productivity is more
likely to lead to satisfaction rather than the
other way around.
D — Perception
• Perception is a process by which
individuals organize and interpret their
sensory impressions in order to give
meaning to their environment.
• None of us sees reality.
• Factors influencing perception:
– the perceiver
– the object or target
– the context of the situation
• Factor in the perceiver
– Attitude
– Personality
– Motives
– Interests
– Experience
– expectations
• Factors in the target
– Novelty
– Motion
– Sounds
– Size
– Background
– Proximity
– Similarity
• Factors in the context of the situation
– Time
– Work setting
– Social setting
Person perception
• Our discussion of perception should focus
on person perception.
Attribution Theory（归因理论）
• The result is that when we observe people,
we attempt to develop explanations of why
they behave in certain ways.
• Our perception and judgment of a person’s
actions, therefore, will be significantly
influenced by the assumptions we make
about that person’s internal state.
• Attribution theory has been proposed to
develop explanations of how we judge
people differently depending on what
meaning we attribute to a given behavior.
• Determination:
– Distinctiveness
– Consensus
– Consistency
• 1967----Kelly
• Internally caused behavior are those
believed to be under the personal control of
the individual.
• Externally caused behavior results from
outside causes; that is, the person is seen as
forced into the behavior by the situation.
• There exists a considerable amount of
deviation in attribution.
• Distinctiveness refers to whether an
individual displays different behaviors in
different situations.
• If everyone who is faced with a similar
situation responds in the same way, we
can say the behavior shows consensus.
• Consistency— Does the person respond
the same way over time?
• All similar behavior are not perceived
similarly.
• We look at actions and judge them within
their situational context.
• There are errors or biases that distort
attributions.
• Fundamental attribution error
• （基本归因错误）
• Self – serving bias（自我服务偏见）
Shortcuts to judging others
• 1.Halo Effect （晕轮效应）
特征
相貌俊美
者
相貌一般
者
相貌丑陋
者
（1）人格的社会合意性
65.39
62.42
56.31
（2）职业地位
2.25
2.02
1.70
（3）婚姻状况
1.70
0.71
0.37
（4）做父母的能力
3.54
4.55
3.91
（5）社会与职业幸福程度
6.37
6.34
5.28
（6）总的幸福程度
11.60
11.60
8.83
（7）结婚的可能性
2.17
1.82
1.52
• 2. Assumed similarity（假定类似）
– Projection（投射）
• 3. Stereotype （刻板印象）
• 4.Selective perception（选择性知觉）
• 5. Primacy effect （首因效应）
• 6. Recency effect（近因效应）
• Specific applications of shortcuts in
organization