CHAPTER 13 FOUNDATIONS OF BEHAVIOR 1. INTRODUCTION. This chapter looks at a number of factors that influence employee behavior and what the implications are for management practice. 2. TOWARD EXPLAINING AND PREDICTING BEHAVIOR. Behavior is defined as the actions of people. Organizational behavior is the study of the actions of people at work. A. Focus of organizational behavior. Organizational behavior focuses on two major areas. 1. Individual behavior. 2. Group behavior. B. Goals of organizational behavior. The goals of OB are to explain and predict behavior. 3. ATTITUDES. Attitudes are defined as evaluative statements concerning objects, people, or events. A. There are three components of attitudes. 1. Cognitive component defines the beliefs, opinions, knowledge, or information held by a person. 2. Affective component is the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude. 3. Behavioral component is an intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something. B. Job-related attitudes include the following. 1. Job satisfaction is a person's general attitude toward his or her job. 2. Job involvement is the degree to which an employee identifies with his or her job, actively participates in it, and considers his or her job performance important to his or her self-worth. 3. Organizational commitment is an employee's orientation toward the organization in terms of his or her loyalty to, identification with, and involvement in the organization. C. Attitudes and consistency. Research has generally shown that people seek consistency among their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior. D. Cognitive dissonance theory defines cognitive dissonance as any incompatibility between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes. E. Attitude surveys involve eliciting responses from employees through questionnaires about how they feel about their jobs, work groups, supervisors, and/or the organization. F. The satisfaction-productivity controversy. After the Hawthorne Studies, many managers believed that if you kept people happy, they would be productive. A review of the research on this relationship shows if satisfaction does have a positive effect on productivity, that effect is fairly small. G. Implications for managers. There is relatively strong evidence that committed and satisfied employees have lower rates of turnover and absenteeism. Also, the belief that making employees happy will make them productive needs to be re-examined. 4. PERSONALITY. Personality is defined as a combination of psychological traits that classifies a person. A. Predicting behavior from personality traits. Six personality traits have been extensively examined to determine if behavior can be predicted. 1. Locus of control can either be internal or external. 2. Authoritarianism is defined as a measure of a person's belief that there should be status and power differences among people in organizations. 3. Machiavellianism is a measure of the degree to which people are pragmatic, maintain emotional distance, and believe that ends justify means. 4. Self-esteem is an individual's degree of like or dislike for him or herself. 5. Self-monitoring is a personality trait that measures an individual's ability to adjust his or her behavior to external situational factors. 6. Risk taking refers to an individual's willingness to take risks. B. Personality assessment tests are commonly used to reveal an individual's personality traits. 1. One of the most popular assessment tests is the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator). It asks people how they usually act or feel in different situations. Your responses puts you at one end or another of four dimensions. a. Social interaction: extrovert or introvert (E or I) b. Preference for gathering data: sensing or intuitive (S or N) c. Preference for decision making: feeling or thinking (F or T) d. Style of making decisions: perceptive or judgmental (P or J) 2. Proponents of personality assessment tests say they're useful because they help people understand the way others interact and solve problems. C. Personality types in different national cultures. We know that there are certainly no common personality types for a given culture. However, a country's culture can influence dominant personality characteristics of its people. This is particularly true for the two personality traits locus of control and authoritarianism. D. Matching personalities and jobs. Efforts have been made to match the proper personalities with the proper jobs. 1. Holland has developed the best documented personality-job fit theory. 2. The key points of this model are that there do appear to be intrinsic differences in personality among individuals, there are different types of jobs, and that people in job environments congruent with their personality types should be more satisfied. E. Implications for managers. The major value of a manager understanding personality differences probably lies in employee selection. 5. PERCEPTION. Perception is defined as the process of organizing and interpreting sensory impressions in order to give meaning to the environment. A. Factors influencing perception. A number of factors operate to shape and sometimes distort perception. These factors are found in the following. 1. The perceiver. 2. The target or object of perception. 3. The situation context. B. Attribution theory is a theory used to develop explanations of how we judge people differently, depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behavior. The determination of the cause of behavior depends upon three factors. 1. Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays a behavior in many situations or whether it is particular to one situation. 2. Consensus refers to whether or not everyone who is faced with a similar situation responds in the same way with the same behavior. 3. Consistency refers to the congruence in a person's actions. 4. There are errors or biases that distort attributions. a. Fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behavior of others. b. Self-serving bias refers to the tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors while putting the blame for failures on external factors. C. Frequently used shortcuts in judging others. There are five shortcuts we might take in judging others. 1. Selectivity refers to the process by which people assimilate certain bits and pieces of what they observe, depending on their interests, background, and attitudes. 2. Assumed similarity is the belief that others are like oneself. 3. Stereotyping refers to judging a person on the basis of one's perception of a group to which he or she belongs. 4. Halo effect refers to a general impression of an individual based on a single characteristic. D. Implications for managers. Managers need to recognize that their employees react to perceptions, not reality. 6. LEARNING. Learning is defined as any relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience. A. Operant conditioning is a type of conditioning in which desired voluntary behavior leads to a reward or prevents a punishment. B. Social learning theory says that people can learn through observation and direct experience. Four processes have been found to determine the influence that a model will have on an individual. 1. Attentional processes, which means that people learn from a model only when they recognize and pay attention to its critical features. 2. Retention processes, which means that a model's influence will depend on how well the individual remembers the model's action. 3. Motor reproduction processes, which describes how an individual can perform the modeled activities. 4. Reinforcement processes, which means that individuals will be motivated to exhibit modeled behavior if positive rewards are provided. C. Shaping is systematically reinforcing each successive step that moves an individual closer to the desired response. It can be a useful managerial tool. Behavior can be shaped in four ways. 1. Positive reinforcement is providing something pleasant after a behavior. 2. Negative reinforcement is rewarding a response with the termination or withdrawal of something unpleasant. 3. Punishment penalizes undesirable behavior. 4. Extinction involves eliminating any reinforcement that is maintaining a behavior. D. Implications for managers. Managers can clearly benefit from understanding the learning process. ANSWERS TO REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. How is an organization like an iceberg? Use the "iceberg metaphor" to describe the field of organizational behavior. An organization is like an iceberg because a lot of informal elements lie beneath the surface and cannot be observed, just like the base of an iceberg lies below the surface beyond visibility. The field of organizational behavior is like an iceberg because there are many behaviors within in organizations that are not visible or known. 2. What are the three components of an attitude? The three components of an attitude are the cognitive component, the affective component, and the behavioral component. 3. Explain how individuals reconcile inconsistencies between attitudes and behaviors. Individuals will take steps to clarify inconsistencies between attitudes and behaviors that they might have. They do this by altering either the attitudes or the behavior, or by developing a rationalization for the discrepancy. 4. What are attitude surveys and how might they help managers? Attitude surveys involve eliciting responses from employees through questionnaires about how they feel about their jobs, work groups, supervisors, and/or the organization. They can help managers by providing information about areas of employee concern. 5. What behavioral predictions might you make if you knew that an employee had (a) an external locus of control? (b) a low Mach score? (c) low self-esteem? (d) high self-monitoring tendencies? Employees with an external locus of control might be less satisfied with their jobs, more alienated from the work setting, and less involved in their jobs. Employees with a low Mach score would be overly idealistic, emotional, and concerned about fair and equitable treatment. Employees with low self-esteem would be more susceptible to external influence. Employees with high self-monitoring tendencies would tend to be more adaptable in adjusting their behavior to the demands of different situations. 6. What are the benefits to a manager of using a personality assessment test such as the MBTI? What are the drawbacks? The benefits of using a personality assessment test are that it can help managers understand personality and predict people's behavior. Also, it can be used to help managers select employees and match them to certain types of jobs. The drawbacks would be the time and expense involved with administering these tests. Also, some individuals don't fit nicely and neatly into predetermined personality categories. 7. How can we use our knowledge of personality to match people to jobs? People can be matched to jobs that best "fit" their type of personality. The best documented personality-job fit theory was developed by John Holland. 8. Name four different shortcuts used in judging others. What effect does each have on perception? Selectivity means that people select only bits and pieces of situations. Assumed similarity is the belief that others are like oneself, which can affect perception about what others are like or what others want from their jobs. Stereotyping is judging a person on the basis of one's perception of a group to which he or she belong. It can distort perceptual judgments. The halo effect is perceiving an individual based on a single characteristic rather than the total package of who that person is. 9. How could operant conditioning help a manager understand and predict behavior? Operant conditioning argues that behavior is a function of its consequences. People learn to behave to get something they want or to avoid something they don't want. By understanding the link between behavior and consequences, a manager can get a better understanding of behavior and better predict what, when, and how behavior is going to happen. 10. What is social learning theory? What are its implications for managing people at work? Social learning theory is the belief that people can learn through observation and direct experience. The implications for managing people is that we can teach people by allowing them to observe and/or directly experience whatever it is we are trying to teach them.