Organizational Behavior

Organizational Behavior 10e
Hellriegel and Slocum

Unit 2 - Chapter 2 Notes

1. Personality Detriments
   Personality represents the profile or combination of stable characteristics that capture the uniqueness of a person. Theories of personality describe what people have in common and what sets them apart. People tend to define personality in terms of stability and continuity. The question is, how is personality determined? Two variables are heredity and environment. Personality seems to be a mixture of those.
   1. Heredity
      Heredity is what people seem to inherit from the traits of their parents. Though some may seem learned, twins raised apart often exhibit similar characteristics so what may be learned may actually be genetics.
   2. environment
      environment has many parts to it.
      • Culture - the distinctive ways that people in different societies organize and live their lives. It helps determine the broad patterns of behavior of a people group.
      • Family - Family is primary source for placing individual culture. Other things that are parts of the mixture that come from family are birth order, size, economic level, race and religion.
      • Group Membership - Though family is primary group that people are in, others come along in their lives, from school to social groups. Each influence the way a person thinks about things. To understand a person one may need to look at the groups that they are in.
      • Life Experience - Things that happen and when the happen influence things in a person, from self-esteem to goal seeking.
2. Personality and Behavior
   Personality traits refer to the basic components of personality and there are thousands of them They seem to be able to break these down into the 'Big Five' Personality Factors
   1. Big Five Personality Factors
      The 'Big Five' personality factors describe the individual's adjustment, sociability, conscientiousness, agreeableness and intellectual openness. There is a relationship between these five traits and job performance.
   2. Self-Esteem
      Self-esteem results from an individual's continuing self-evaluation. Self- esteem affects vocational choices. High self-esteem seems to relate to risks in job selection, taking jobs that high-status and/or unconventional. Low self-esteem people tend to lead to inflated value of the opinion people place on them. Self-esteem is important in terms of work behavior.
   3. Locus of Control
      Locus of control refers to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events affecting them. People who believe they control their own destiny (internals) are more likely to influence and persuade others and be achievement oriented. The other group (externals) prefer a structured directive style of supervision.
   4. Goal Orientation
      Goal Orientation is broken up in to two components, learning goal orientation (acquiring and mastering mew competencies) and performance goal orientation (seeking favorable opinions from others). Strong performance goal people are likely to avoid challenges. When failure results these people will withdraw. Strong learning goal orientation people tend to try to overcome obstacles and treat failure as a feedback to what to fix. In fact, the slogan, "when the going gets tough, the tough get going, " reflects them.
   5. Introversion and Extroversion
      Introversion is the tendency to direct thoughts inward, and have greater affinity for abstract ideas. Extroversion is oriented towards people, events and objects. Most people are moderately between the two. Extremes on either part will affect how a person reacts on the job. The tendency is for extroverts to be managers though. Introverts tend to perform better it quiet surroundings, extroverts in places with lots of sensory stimulations.
   6. Organizational Uses
      Mangers or companies should not try to change or directly control employee personality. It is basically impossible, but if it were, it would likely be unethical. The challenge is to harness the employee's personality.
   7. The Person and the Situation
      Though in some cases employees may all act the same way, this does not mean they share the same personality. There is a personal and a situational aspect to behavior.
3. Attitudes and Behaviors
   Attitudes are lasting feelings, beliefs and behavioral tendencies aimed at people, groups, ideas, or objects.
   1. Components of Attitudes
      • affective - feelings, sentiments, moods and emotions
      • cognitive - thoughts, opinions, knowledge, or information
      • behavioral - predisposition to act favorably or unfavorably on something
      These all come in to play together, but other things may modify what actually happens.
   2. Links to Behavior
      Three things improve the accuracy of predicting behavior from attitudes.
      • General attitudes best predict general behavior
      • Specific attitudes best specific behaviors
      • The less time that elapses between attitude measurement and behavior, the more consistent will be the relationship between attitude and behavior
      One link for attitude and behavior is hope. Hope can be defined as mental will power added to the waypower (determination) to achieve goals. Managers can increase hope in three ways.
      1. Help employees set clear goals
      2. Help employees break long term goals into smaller sub-goals
      3. Help employees figure out how to motivate themselves.
4. Work Attitudes
   1. Job Satisfaction
      Job satisfaction is the feelings that reflect the attitude towards a job. If it is low there will be high job turnover. To change one has to look at:
      • Sources of Job Satisfaction
      • Relation to Job Behavior - between job satisfaction and job behaviors and other outcomes in the workplace.
   2. Organizational Commitment
      Organizational Commitment is the strength of an employee's commitment to the organization. It goes beyond loyalty, including a contribution to accomplishing the goals of the organization. Sources vary from person to person and can change over time (pay when young, job market of person when older. SInce lack of commitment leads to turn over it is something that organizations need to understand.
5. Individual Differences in Ethical Behavior
   1. Types of Management Ethics
      • Immoral Management - behavior devoid of any ethical principles. Belief in maximum exploitation of any opportunities for corporate or personal gains.
      • Moral Management - behavior focused on doing what is right, and profits come second to ethics.
      • Amoral Management - indifference to ethical concerns. There is no thought about what will occur if actions taken in organization.
   2. Establishing Ethical Attitudes
      Though organizations cannot change personalities of employees, they should establish moral management from the top person on down.