Employee Behavior and Motivation

Employee Behavior and Motivation

• Employee Behavior: The pattern of actions by members of an organization that directly or indirectly influences the organization's effectiveness.
• Performance Behaviors: The total set of work-related behaviors that the organization expects employees to display.
• Organizational Citizenship: Positive behaviors that do not directly contribute to the bottom line, but are beneficial to the organization.
• Counterproductive Behaviors: Behaviors that detract from organizational performance, including absenteeism, turnover, theft, sabotage, sexual harassment, and workplace violence.

Personality at Work

• Personality: The relatively stable set of psychological attributes that distinguish one person from another.
• The "Big Five" Personality Traits:
  • Agreeableness: A person's ability to get along with others.
  • Conscientiousness: A reflection of the number of things a person tries to accomplish.
  • Emotionality: The degree to which people tend to be positive or negative in their outlook and behaviors toward others.
  • Extraversion: A person's comfort level with relationships.
  • Openness: Refers to how open or rigid a person is in terms of their beliefs.

Emotional Intelligence

• Emotional Intelligence (Emotional Quotient, EQ): The extent to which people are self-aware, can manage their emotions, can motivate themselves, express empathy for others, and possess social skills.
• Components of Emotional Intelligence:
  • Self-awareness: A person's capacity for being aware of how they are feeling.
  • Managing emotions: A person's capacity to balance anxiety, fear, and anger so that they do not overly interfere with getting things accomplished.
  • Motivating oneself: A person's ability to remain optimistic and strive in the face of setbacks, barriers, and failure.
  • Empathy: A person's ability to understand how others are feeling even without being explicitly told.
  • Social skills: A person's ability to get along with others and establish positive relationships.

Attitudes at Work

• Attitudes: A person's beliefs and feelings about specific ideas, situations, or people.
• Job Satisfaction: The degree of enjoyment that people derive from performing their jobs.
• Organizational Commitment: An individual's identification with the organization and its mission.

Matching People and Jobs

• Psychological Contract: The set of expectations held by an employee concerning what they will contribute to an organization and what the organization will provide in return.
• Person-Job Fit: The extent to which a person's contributions and the organization's inducements match one another.

Motivation Concepts and Theories

• Motivation: The set of forces that cause people to behave in certain ways.
• Classical Theory of Motivation: Theory holding that workers are motivated solely by money.
• Two-Factor Theory of Motivation: Theory holding that motivation is based on hygiene factors (basic needs) and motivator factors (higher-level needs).
• Equity Theory: Theory holding that people evaluate their treatment by an organization relative to the treatment of others.
• Reinforcement/Behavior Modification: A method of motivating behavior through positive reinforcement, punishment, and other consequences.
• Management by Objectives (MBO): A set of procedures involving both managers and subordinates in setting goals and evaluating progress.

Using Goals to Motivate Behavior

• Participative Management and Empowerment: A method of increasing job satisfaction by giving employees a voice in the management of their jobs and the company.

Job Enrichment and Job Redesign

• Job Enrichment: A method of increasing job satisfaction by adding one or more motivating factors to job activities.
• Job Redesign: A method of increasing job satisfaction by designing a more satisfactory fit between workers and their jobs.
• Components of Job Redesign:
  • Combining Tasks: Enlarging jobs and increasing their variety to make employees feel that their work is more meaningful.
  • Forming Natural Work Groups: Helping employees see the importance of their jobs in the total structure of the firm.
  • Establishing Client Relationships: Letting employees interact with customers.

Modified Work Schedules

• Work Sharing (Job Sharing): A method of increasing job satisfaction by allowing two or more people to share a single full-time job.
• Flextime Programs: A method of increasing job satisfaction by allowing workers to adjust work schedules on a daily or weekly basis.
• Telecommuting: A form of flextime that allows people to perform some or all of a job away from standard office settings.
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Modified Schedules and Alternative Workplaces:actionDate