Foundations of Behavior

1. Foundations of Behavior

2. What is challenging about individual behavior in organizations?

3. Today’s Agenda • Attitudes • Personality • Perception • Attributions

4. 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”

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. Personality • Personality: The unique combination of psychological traits that describe a person. • Why does personality matter? • Predict behavior • Manage behavior • Interact with others

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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: ___________

12. Machiavellianism • How do you gain and manipulate power • High: • emotional distance • ends justify means • Implications for work: • Not necessarily bad • Depends on jobs: bargaining skills, commission based work

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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.

16. 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

17. 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

18. Interpretation Attribution of Cause Observation High External Distinctiveness Low Internal High External Individual Behavior Consensus Low Internal High Internal Consistency Low External Lets work through an example: Do you think Jenny is hard to get along with? Many or one situation? Many or one person(s)? Many or one times?

19. 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

20. 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 • ________________