Organizational Behavior Concepts

• Here's a summary of Organizational Behavior topics, using the provided text

Week 1: What is OB?

• Organizational Behavior (OB) is a field that studies the impact of individuals, groups, and structure on behavior within organizations.
• The purpose of OB is to improve an organization’s effectiveness.
• A manager gets things done through other people in organizations.
• An organization is a consciously coordinated social unit of two or more people.
• Organizations function continuously to achieve a common goal or set of goals.
• A model is a simplified representation of a real-world phenomenon.
• Stress is an unpleasant psychological process in response to environmental pressures.
• Task performance is the combination of effectiveness and efficiency at doing core job tasks.
• Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is discretionary behavior not part of an employee’s formal job requirements.
• OCB contributes to the psychological and social environment of the workplace.
• Withdrawal behavior includes actions employees take to separate themselves from the organization.
• Examples of withdrawal behavior are absenteeism, turnover, searching for a new job, and moonlighting.
• Group cohesion refers to the extent to which members of a group support and validate one another at work.
• Group functioning relates to the quantity and quality of a group’s work output.
• Productivity means an organization achieves its goals by transforming inputs into outputs at the lowest cost.
• Productivity requires both effectiveness and efficiency.
• Organizational survival is evidence that the organization can exist and grow over the long term.

Week 2: Job Satisfaction

• Attitudes are evaluative statements about objects, people, or events.
• Attitudes have three components: cognitive (thoughts), affective (feelings), and behavioral (actions).
• Cognitive dissonance is any incompatibility an individual perceives between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes.
• People seek consistency among their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior.
• Job Satisfaction is a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics.
• Job satisfaction can be measured by a single global rating or the summation of job facets.
• Job facets include the work itself, pay, promotion, supervisor, and coworkers.
• Job Involvement is the degree to which a person identifies with a job, actively participates in it, and considers performance important to self-worth.
• Organizational Commitment is identifying with a particular organization and its goals and wishing to maintain membership.
• The three components of organizational commitment are affective, continuance, and normative commitment.
• Affective commitment means liking the organization.
• Continuance commitment means the cost of leaving is too high.
• Normative commitment means leaving makes you feel guilty.
• Perceived Organizational Support (POS) is the degree to which employees believe the organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being.
• POS is higher when rewards are fair, employees are involved in decision making, and supervisors are seen as supportive.

Outcomes of Job Satisfaction

• Happy workers are more likely to be productive workers.
• People more satisfied with their jobs are more likely to engage in OCB.
• Counterproductive work behavior includes actions that actively damage the organization.
• The more satisfied you are, the less likely you are to miss work (absenteeism).
• A pattern of lowered job satisfaction is the best predictor of intent to leave (turnover).

Responses to Dissatisfaction

• Exit involves directing behavior toward leaving the organization.
• Voice involves actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions.
• Loyalty means passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to improve.
• Neglect means passively allowing conditions to worsen.

Emotions & Moods

• Affect is a generic term that covers a broad range of feelings people experience.
• Emotions are intense feelings that are directed at someone or something.
• Moods are feelings that tend to be less intense than emotions and lack a contextual stimulus.
• Positivity offset means that at zero input, most people experience a mildly positive mood.
• Emotional labor is an employee’s expression of organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions at work.
• Felt emotions are the individual’s actual emotions.
• Displayed emotions are required or appropriate emotions.
• Surface acting involves hiding feelings and foregoing emotional expressions in response to display rules.
• Deep acting involves trying to modify true inner feelings based on display rules.
• Emotional dissonance involves inconsistencies between felt emotions and projected emotions.
• Affective events theory (AET) posits that employees react emotionally to things that happen at work, influencing job performance and satisfaction.
• Emotional Intelligence is a person’s ability to perceive emotions in themselves and others, and to understand the meaning of these emotions.
• Emotion regulation involves identifying and modifying the emotions you feel.
• Techniques for emotion regulation include surface acting, deep acting, emotional suppression, cognitive reappraisal, social sharing, mindfulness, and perspective-taking.
• Affect as Information describes how people use their current emotion or mood to help make current decisions.

Week 3: Personality and Values

• Personality is the sum of ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts with others.
• Personality is 50% heredity and 50% influenced by environment.

The Big Five Model

• Extraversion: High scorers are gregarious, assertive, sociable; low scorers are reserved, timid, and quiet.
• Agreeableness: High scorers are cooperative, warm, and trusting; low scorers are cold and antagonistic.
• Conscientiousness: High scorers are responsible, organized, dependable, and persistent; low scorers are easily distracted, disorganized, and unreliable.
• Neuroticism: High scorers are nervous, anxious, depressed, and insecure; low scorers are calm, secure, emotionally stable.
• Openness to experience: High scorers are creative, curious, and artistic; low scorers are conventional and prefer routine.

Other Important Traits

• Core Self-Evaluation: Bottom-line conclusions individuals have about their capabilities, competence, and worth as a person.
• Self-Monitoring: Measures an individual’s ability to adjust his or her behavior to external, situational factors.
• Proactive Personality: People who identify opportunities, show initiative, take action, and persevere until meaningful change occurs.
• Situation Strength Theory: The way personality translates into behavior depends on the strength of the situation.
• Trait Activation Theory: Personality traits are engaged when called on by the right type of situation.
• Person-Organization Fit: Direction of Person-Job fit and outcomes.

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

• Power distance is the degree to which people in a country accept that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally.
• Individualism versus collectivism: Individualism is the degree to which people prefer to act as individuals rather than as members of groups.
• Collectivism emphasizes a tight social framework where people expect others in groups to look after them and protect them.

Perception and Decision Making

• Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions to give meaning to their environment.
• Attribution theory suggests that when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused, depending on distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency.
• Fundamental attribution error involves underestimating external factors and overestimating internal factors when observing others’ behaviors.
• Self-serving bias involves attributing one's own successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.
• Selective perception means that any characteristic that makes a person, object, or event stand out will increase the probability that it will be perceived.
• Halo effect occurs when we draw a general positive impression based on a single characteristic.
• Horns effect occurs when we draw a general negative impression based on a single characteristic.
• Stereotyping involves judging someone based on one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs.

Applications of Attribution Theory

• Performance Evaluation: An employee’s performance appraisal depends on the perceptual process.
• Performance Expectations: People will attempt to validate their perceptions of reality.
• Bounded Rationality: People construct simplified models that extract the essential features needed to make a decision.
• People satisfice – they seek solutions that are satisfactory and sufficient.

Common Biases and Errors in Decision Making

• Overconfidence Bias: Individuals with weaker intellectual abilities overestimate their performance.
• Anchoring Bias: Fixating on initial information.
• Confirmation Bias: Seeking information that reaffirms past choices.
• Availability Bias: Basing judgments on readily available information.
• Escalation of Commitment: Staying with a decision even when there is clear evidence that it’s wrong.
• Randomness Error: Believing we can predict the outcome of random events.
• Risk Aversion: Preferring a sure thing instead of a risky outcome.
• Hindsight Bias: The tendency to falsely believe that one has accurately predicted the outcome of an event after the outcome is actually known.

Week 4: Theories of Motivation

• Motivation accounts for an individual’s intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal.
• Intensity is concerned with how hard a person tries.
• Direction is the orientation that benefits the organization.
• Persistence is a measure of how long a person can maintain his/her effort.
• Self-Determination Theory suggests that people prefer to feel they have control over their actions, and focuses on the benefits of intrinsic motivation and the harms of extrinsic motivation.
• Cognitive evaluation theory: When people are paid for work, it feels less like something they want to do and more like something they have to do.
• Goal-Setting Theory suggests that goals tell an employee what needs to be done and how much effort is needed.
• Specific and difficult goals lead to higher performance.
• Self-efficacy theory refers to an individual’s belief that he or she is capable of performing a task.
• Operant conditioning theory suggests that people learn to behave to get something they want or to avoid something they don’t want.
• Social-learning theory posits that we can learn through both observation and direct experience.
• Expectancy theory suggests that a tendency to act in a certain way depends on an expectation that the act will be followed by a given outcome and on the attractiveness of that outcome.
• Expectancy is the effort–performance relationship.
• Instrumentality is the performance–reward relationship.
• Valence is the rewards–personal goals relationship.
• Equity theory argues that individuals make comparisons of their job inputs and outcomes relative to those of others and then respond to any inequities.
• The Model of Organizational Justice involves the interaction between distributive and procedural justice.
• Positive Mood and Expectancy Theory describes how a positive mood increases motivation, increasing expectancy, instrumentality, and valence.

Applications of Motivation

• Job Characteristics Model: Describes core job dimensions.
• Skill variety: The degree to which the job requires a variety of different activities.
• Task identity: The degree to which the job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work.
• Task significance: The degree to which the job has a substantial impact on the lives or work of other people.
• Autonomy: The degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the individual in scheduling the work and determining the procedures to be used.
• Feedback: The degree to which carrying out the work activities required by the job results in the individual obtaining direct and clear information about the effectiveness of performance.
• Job Rotation: Periodic shifting from one task to another.
• Job Enrichment: Increasing a job’s high-level responsibilities to increase intrinsic motivation.
• Relational Job Design: Connecting employees with the beneficiaries of their work.
• Telecommuting involves employees who do their work at home at least two days a week through virtual devices linked to the employer’s office.

Week 5: Foundations of Group Behavior

• Social identity theory proposes that people have emotional reactions to the failure or success of their group because their self-esteem gets tied into the performance of the group.

Punctuated Equilibrium Model

• The first meeting sets the group’s direction.
• A transition takes place at the end of this first phase.
• A second phase of inertia follows the transition.
• The group’s last meeting is characterized by markedly accelerated activity.
• Role: A set of expected behavior patterns attributed to someone occupying a given position in a social unit.
• Role perception: One’s perception of how to act in a given situation.
• Role expectations: How others believe one should act in a given situation.
• Role conflict: A situation in which an individual faces divergent role expectations.
• Norms are acceptable standards of behavior within a group that are shared by the group’s members.
• Asch’s conformity study demonstrated that subjects conformed in about 37% of the trials.
• Status is a socially defined position or rank given to groups or group members by others.
• Group size affects the group’s overall behavior.
• Diversity is the degree to which members of the group are similar to, or different from, one another.
• Strengths of group decision making include more complete information, increased diversity of views, and increased acceptance of solutions.
• Weaknesses of group decision making include time-consuming processes and conformity pressures.
• Groupthink describes situations where group pressures for conformity deter the group from critically appraising unusual, minority, or unpopular views.
• Brainstorming can overcome pressures for conformity.
• Nominal group technique restricts discussion or interpersonal communication during the decision-making process.

Understanding Work Teams

• Team interdependence describes the degree to which team members rely on one another.
• Task Interdependence is the degree to which team members must interact and rely on one another to accomplish team goals.
• Goal interdependence is the degree to which team members align individual goals with team goals.
• Outcome interdependence is the degree to which members are linked to one another in terms of feedback and outcomes they receive as a consequence of working with the team.

Team Processes

• Team efficacy describes teams having confidence in themselves and believing they can succeed.
• Team cohesion describes when members are emotionally attached to one another and motivated toward the team because of their attachment.
• Mental models are organized mental representations of the key elements within a team’s environment that team members share.
• Relationship conflict involves disagreements among team members in terms of interpersonal relationships or incompatibilities with respect to personal values.
• Task conflict involves disagreements among members about the team’s task.
• Social loafing occurs when individuals hide inside a group and shirk their responsibilities onto others.

Ways to improve communication

• Choose an appropriate medium depending on how detailed or rich the information is.
• Train emotional intelligence.

Test your knowledge of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), cognitive dissonance, and group functioning. Explore the components of attitude and effectiveness. Review withdrawal behaviors and groupthink in organizations.