Understanding Individual Behavior

• Interdisciplinary field — study human attitudes, behavior, and performance in organizations; Important to managers as they depend on human cooperation.
• Organizational citizenship – work behavior that goes beyond job requirements and contributes to the organization’s success; the tendency of people to help one another
• Managers must select people with positive attitudes, help them contribute, and enable them to learn from workplace, to encourage organizational citizenship.
• DQ: How can a manager encourage organizational citizenship?
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• Attitude = a positive or negative evaluation that predisposes a person to act in a certain way; determine:
– how people perceive the work environment, interact with others, and behave on the job
• Negative Attitude = Hard to get along with; Always gripe;
Consistently resist new ideas
• Positive Attitude = Positive, happy people are healthier, more effective, and more productive
• Managers must develop and reinforce positive attitudes
• DQ: Describe evidence of a negative attitude at workplace.
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14.1
Components of Attitudes
(1) Cognitions
(2) Affect (feelings)
(3) Behavior
DQ: How do three components impact on an attitude?
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High-Performance Work Attitudes
• Job Satisfaction – a positive attitude toward one’s job
• Organizational Commitment - an employee’s loyalty to and engagement with the organization
• Managers want the benefit of loyal, committed employees
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14.2 Rate Your Job Satisfaction

- Conflicts
Among Attitudes
• Cognitive Dissonance = a psychological discomfort that occurs when individuals recognize inconsistencies in their own attitudes and behaviors
• Cognitive Dissonance Theory = People want to behave in accordance with their attitudes and will take corrective action to alleviate the dissonance and achieve balance .
• Cognitive Dissonance & Negative Attitude: If corrective action, such as adjusting work hours, is not possible, individuals may develop negative attitudes toward their employer.
• DQ: How cognitive dissonance is related to negative attitude?
• DQ: How can a manager control employee’s cognitive dissonance?
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..the cognitive process people use to make sense of the environment
• Perceptual Selectivity –the process of screening and selecting stimuli
• Perceptual Distortions – errors in perceptual judgment
– Stereotyping : generalizing about group or individual
– Halo effect: impression based on one characteristic
– Perceptual defense: protecting oneself against objects and ideas that are threatening
• Attributions – judgment about the cause of behavior
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14.3 The Perception Process
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• As people organize what they perceive, they often draw conclusions about the stimuli. Attributions are judgments about what caused a person’s behavior— something about the person or something about the situation.
• An internal attribution says characteristics of the person led to the behavior.
• An external attribution says something about the situation caused the person’s behavior.
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Three factors influence whether an attribution will be external or internal.
1. Distinctiveness. Whether the behavior is unusual for that person.
2. Consistency. Whether the person being observed has a history of behaving in the same way.
3. Consensus. Whether other people tend to respond to similar situations in the same way.
• Fundamental attribution error is the tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors on another’s behavior and to overestimate the influence of internal factors.
• Self-serving bias is the tendency to overestimate the contribution of internal factors to one’s successes and the contribution of external factors to one’s failures.
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14.6
Factors Influencing Whether Attributions Are Internal or External

1. Extroversion = the degree to which a person is sociable, talkative, assertive, and comfortable with interpersonal relationships.
2. Agreeableness = the degree to which a person is able to get along with others by being good-natured, cooperative, forgiving, understanding, and trusting.
3. Conscientiousness = the degree to which a person is focused on a few goals, thus behaving in ways that are responsible, dependable, persistent, and achievement oriented.
4. Emotional stability = the degree to which a person is calm, enthusiastic, and secure, rather than tense, nervous, depressed, moody, or insecure.
5. Openness to experience = the degree to which a person has a broad range of interests and is imaginative, creative, artistically sensitive, and willing to consider new ideas.
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14.7
The Big Five Personality Traits

Attitudes and Behaviors Influenced by Personality:
Locus of Control
• Locus of Control = Whether individuals place the primary responsibility for success or failure within themselves
(internally) or on outside forces (externally).
• People with an internal locus of control:
– Easier to motivate & better able to handle complex information
– Better at problem solving
– More achievement oriented
– More independent  More difficult to manage
• People with an external locus of control:
– Harder to motivate, less involved in their jobs, and more likely to blame others,
– More compliant and conforming  Easier to manage

14.8 Measuring Locus of Control

Attitudes and Behaviors Influenced by Personality:
Authoritarianism & Machiavellianism
• Authoritarianism = The belief that power and status differences should exist within the organization.
– More friction b/w a manager & employees in their degree of authoritarianism  Less management effectiveness.
– The trend: The more empowerment & equitable relationships, the less authoritarianism.
• Machiavellianism = the tendency to direct much of one’s behavior toward the acquisition of power and the manipulation of others for personal gain.
– High Machs are predisposed to being pragmatic, capable of lying to achieve personal goals, more likely to win in win-lose situations, and more likely to persuade than to be persuaded.
– In loosely structured situations  High Machs
– In highly structured situations  Low Machs
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Attitudes and Behaviors Influenced by Personality:
• Sensation or Intuition (Carl Jung):
– Sensation-type: facts and data
– Intuitive-type: Looking for possibilities, use abstract concepts
• Thinking or Feeling.
– Thinking-type: impersonal analysis using reason and logic
– Feeling-type: personal feelings, such as harmony, and make decisions that result in approval from others.
• 4 Problem-solving Styles:
– (1) Sensation & Thinking
– (2) Intuition & Thinking
– (3) Sensation & Feeling
– (4) Intuition & Feeling

14.9 Four Problem-Solving Styles

Attitudes and Behaviors Influenced by Personality:
• Introversion vs. Extroversion
•
• Judging vs. Perceiving
• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) = a personality test that measures a person’s preference for introversion vs. extroversion, sensation vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving.
– 16 personality types
– Thinking, Judging  Most significant factors on Mgmt
Effectiveness
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• Person job fit
– Manager’s Responsibility – A manager must match the right employees with the right jobs
– Increases job satisfaction and commitment
– If this fit is poor, a manager must restructure tasks or replace employees
• Person-environment fit - employees who fit organizational environment

• A mental state that arises spontaneously within a person based on interactions
• People cannot be separated from their emotions
• Managers can influence positive or negative emotions at work
– Emotional contagion
• Good managers pay attention to people’s emotions
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14.10
Positive and Negative Emotions

• Self-awareness = being aware of what you are feeling
• Self-management = the ability to control disruptive or harmful emotions and balance one’s moods so that worry, anxiety, fear, or anger do not cloud thinking
• Social awareness = the ability to understand others and practice empathy, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, recognizing the feelings of others without being told
• Relationship awareness = the ability to connect to others, build positive relationships, respond to the emotions of others, and influence others

• Positive relationship between job performance and high degrees of EQ
• At times of great change or crisis, managers rely on a high EQ level to help employees cope with anxiety and stress.
•
• Managers with low EQ  Undermine employee morale and harm the organization
– Make such low EQ manager improve their selfawareness
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Learning is a change in behavior or performance that occurs as the result of experience
– Ability to adapt to changes in the world
– Managers have to learn
– Active experimentation promotes learning
– Requires reflection
Managers are required to change and therefore they must learn
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14.11 Experiential Learning
Cycle
Copyright ©2012 by South-Western, a division of Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
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 Individuals’ learning styles vary
 Questionnaires can aid in determining learning styles
 It helps for managers to know their dominant learning style
 Diverger, Assimilator, Converger, and
Accommodator
.
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14.12 What’s Your Learning Style?

Stress and Stress Management
• Work-related stress is increasing worldwide
• Low levels of stress can be a positive force
• Too much stress can have negative consequences
• Causes of Work Stress
– Task demands – role ambiguity
– Interpersonal demand – role conflict
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Type A Behavior
Pattern characterized by extreme competitiveness, impatience, aggressiveness, and devotion to work
Copyright ©2012 by South-Western, a division of Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
Type B Behavior
Pattern that lacks Type A characteristics and includes more balanced, relaxed lifestyle
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Innovative Responses to
Stress Management
 Quiet rooms
 Wellness programs
 Training programs
 Manager intervention
 Work-life balance initiatives

14.13 How Managers Create Stress for Employees

•
Discussion Questions (in progress)
• Define attitudes and explain their relationship to personality, perception, and behavior.
• Discuss the importance of work-related attitudes.
• Define major personality traits and describe how personality can influence workplace attitudes and behaviors.
• Identify positive and negative emotions and describe how emotions affect behavior.
• Define the four components of emotional intelligence and explain why they are important for today’s managers.
• Explain how people learn in general and in terms of individual learning styles.
• Discuss the effects of stress and identify ways individuals and organizations
• can manage stress to improve employee health, satisfaction, and productivity.
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