Organizational Behavior: Diversity in the Workplace

Here are some detailed study notes.

Diversity Matters

• A situation can be improved by carefully considering surface-level and deep-level diversity during team formation.
• Assembling a diverse group of individuals with varying ages, ethnicities, and genders, while recognizing differences in values, attitudes, and work styles is important.
• An inclusive approach results in a wealth of creative ideas, enabling the team to complete projects ahead of schedule and launch applications that resonate with a broad audience.

Diversity in OB

• Workplace diversity measures an organization's representation of different cultures.
• Surface-level diversity describes easily perceived differences like age, generation, and race.
• Deep-level diversity includes verbal/nonverbal behaviors not easily perceived because they lie below the surface, like attitudes, beliefs, and values.
• Managing ability diversity begins when selecting employees whose abilities best fit a role, leading to increased productivity and job satisfaction.
• Three diversity initiatives commonly implemented by companies include:
  • Reducing Bias: Addressing the tendency to show unfair prejudice.
  • Hiring Tests: While 40% of U.S. firms use tests to fight bias for front-line roles, some managers use them selectively.
  • Grievance Procedures: Establish a safe platform for employees to address discrimination concerns, covering issues like pay, promotion, or termination.
• Ways to promote diversity:
  • Implement college recruitment programs targeted at women and minorities
  • Mentoring to get involved with people from different races, ethnicities and gender
  • Increase contact between diverse groups of people in the workplace, and encouraging social accountability
• Managing cross-cultural diversity involves cultivating a deep appreciation and respect for cultural differences.
• There should be a willingness to change behavior and perspectives to communicate with other employees, teams, and organizations.
• The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) has 6 stages and was created by Dr. Milton Bennet.

DMIS Stages

• Denial: People don't believe differences exist and aren't interested in cultural differences.
• Defense/reversal: People recognize cultural differences but feel threatened.
• Minimization: People are aware but focus on human elements rather than differences, adopting a "live and let live" mentality.
• Acceptance: People deeply understand their own and others' cultural identities, valuing different cultural experiences.
• Adaptation: People can view situations from different cultural perspective, and adjust their behavior for effective management.
• Integration: People deeply understand, and successfully integrate, one or more cultures into their own identity.

Cultural Metacognition

• Cultural metacognition defines one's conscious cultural awareness during cross-cultural interactions.
• Individuals interacting across cultures exhibit higher cultural metacognition levels.
• Openness to cultural diversity
• Flexibility and adaptability
• Emotional resilience
• Curiosity
• Tolerance and respect for differences
• Patience
• A nonjudgmental attitude
• Global identity
• Cultural intelligence
• Global leadership behaviors
• Multicultural experiences, such as being multilingual and having lived in more than one country.

Individual Differences

• Individual differences encompass behavioral and cognitive similarities among people.
• Understanding them relies on high self-awareness, as well as awareness of others.
• Self-concept is how one feels about themselves and it includes:
  • Self-esteem: Our own worth
  • Self-efficacy: Our ability to succeed in a task
• Twin studies suggest 40% of personality is inherited, while 60% comes from environmental and situational factors.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

• MBTI is a psychometric tool assessing four psychological preferences combined to describe 16 personality tests.
• These preferences include:
  • Extraversion (E) versus Introversion (I): Extraverts talkative, expressive, outgoing, while introverts are reserved, working independently.
  • Sensing (S) versus Intuitive (N): Sensing people prefer known facts, while intuitive people are imaginative.
  • Thinking (T) versus Feeling (F): Thinking people use logic to make decisions while feeling types draw on other's values.
  • Judging (J) versus Perceiving (P): Judging people prefer order and structure, while perceiving people flexible and adaptable.
• Approximately 11-14% are ISTJ, 9-14% are ISFJ, 1-3% INFJ, 2-4% INTJ, 4-6% ISTP, 5-9% ISFP, 4-5% INFP, 3-5% INTP, 4-5% ESTP, 4-9% ESFP, 6-8% ENFP, 2-5% ENTP, 8-12% ESTJ, 9-13% ESFJ, 2-5% ENFJ, 2-5% ENTJ in the US population.
• MBTI lacks emotional stability/neuroticism insight, receiving minimal academic respect.
• Emotional stability relates to staying calm and composed.
• A Neuroticism is a tendency to be tense, moody, irritable and temperamental.

Big Five Model

• The big five model includes:
• Openness to experience is to being curious and creative
• Conscientiousness is to being thoughtful and organized
• Neuroticism is to being tense and moody
• Extraversion is to being outgoing and sociable
• Agreeableness is to being trusting and good natured, tolerant, forgiving, and cooperative.
• Core self-evaluation (CSE) encompasses self-appraisals of abilities, self-worth, control, and capabilities. The dimensions include:
  • "Locus of control, emotional stability, self-efficacy, and self-esteem."
• Locus of Control:
• Internal locus of control is where people believe they control events.
• External locus of control is where performance depends on circumstances beyond one's control.

Personality Attributes

• Machiavellianism: Describes people who manipulate others unethically, often exhibiting pragmatism, lying tendencies, influence, and detachment from morality.
• Self-monitoring: Adaptability to accommodate different situations.
  • High self-monitors match behavior to the situation.
  • Low self-monitors show behaviors with little regard for others' perceptions.
• Proactive personality: Individuals can take the initiative.
  • High proactive personality change events.
• Low proactive change are more accepting of the status quo.
• Type A Orientation: Impatient, aggressive, competitive, achievement-oriented.
• Type B Orientation: Relaxed, easy-going, patient and less competitive.
• Risk-taking propensity affects behaviours positive or negative outcomes.
• High risk-takers : make faster decisions
• Low risk-takers are more thorough but may be indecisive.

Perception

• Perception defines the process by which information is received and interpreted.
• Perception is important for nurturing a healthy workplace culture.
• Understanding that interpretations can change depending on the person
• A successful project manager implements this process to ensure the proper communication is had with her team

Perception Factors

• Managing perception requires considering the perceiver, the external environment, and the focal object.
• Perception check activity is analyzing an image and thinking about how personal biases could affect your perception
• Psychologist Kurt Lewin observed, in 1936, people act not on reality, but perceptions.
• Interpretation of events tend to vary.

Perceptual Distortions

• Perceptual errors exist and can affect interpersonal relationships Common perceptual distortions include:
  • Stereotypes: Generalizing based on group membership, etc
  • Selective attention: Focusing on certain info while ignoring others
  • Halo effect: A single trait overshadows all others
  • Primacy effect: Recall items appearing to the beginning
  • Recency effect: Recall items appearing the end
  • Contrast effect: Comparison to other recently observed items
  • Projecting: Attributing one's own characteristics to others
  • Self-fulfilling prophecy: A belief that leads to its own fulfilment
  • Impression management: Controlling how others perceive you
  • Ingratiation: Becoming more popular or getting what you want by agreeing with the person
• Attribution theory is where someone uses internal attributions and situational factors to explain the behaviour of others:
  • Internal attributions include personal characteristics
  • External attributions include situational factors
• Three factors influence internal vs external:
  • Consistency: Is someone’s behaviour normal?
  • Distinctiveness: Does this behaviour happen in a special situation?
  • Consensus: Do people you work with agree on the situation?
• Fundamental attribution error is the tendency to underestimate external factors while overestimating internal factors assessing behaviour.
• Self-serving bias reflects attributing successes internally and failures externally.

Learning Processes

• Learning involves adjusting behavior based on experience and three perspectives. Perspective include:
  • Classical Conditioning
  • Operant Conditioning
  • Reinforcement theory Classical conditioning uses stimuli to accomplish learning. Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov established this.
• Operant conditioning creates associations between learning and behavior.
• Future behaviours are managed by controlling its consequences.
• Reinforcement theory builds on operant conditioning.
  • Positive reinforcement includes positive consequences from from certain actions
  • Negative reinforcement include the use of removing past consequences from certain actions.

Reinforcement

• Punishment: Undesirable behavior can be discouraged using unpleasant consequences or removing positive ones.
• Extinction: Reduce likelihood behaviour being repeated by taking away all consequences.
• Schedules of reinforcement determine the instances where behaviours are reinforced through continuous and intermittent methods.
• Continuous reinforcement
• Intermittent reinforcement
• Fixed interval schedule
• Fixed ratio schedule
• Variable interval schedule
• Variable ratio schedule

Social Learning

• Social cognitive theory says learning occurs through observation, imitation, and modeling within a social context.
• Aspects of it are:
  • Self efficacy
  • Vicarious learning is the process of learning by consequences of others
  • Self-regulation is people create a goal to be the best it can be
• Triadic reciprocal behaviour says functioning relies on; reinforcement, cognitive processes, behavior.

Emotions

• Moods encompass less intense feelings lacking a specific target.
• Affects cover a wide range of feelings.
• There are six essentially universal emotions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise.
• Mood dimensions include:
  • Positive affect: excitement, cheerfulness
  • Negative affect: boredom, exhaustion.
• Emotions & Moods influence each other.
• Emotion is always dominant over rational choices in the workplace
  • Can be solved by getting opinion of others for help
• One's own performance can be affected by uncontrolled emotions in the workplace.

Emotional Communication

• Emotional contagion involves emotion spread from work group as negative spreads faster than positive.
  • Positive emotional contagion enhances work with less conflict and high performance.
• Emotional labor governs the way that workers are supposed to respond in a given environment
• Emotional dissonance occurs due to one's inner and outer expression.
• Emotional labour has:
  • Surface acting supresses true feelings to display something correct
  • Deep acting is changing emotions internally, to something appropriate in workplace.
• Emotional regulation controls feelings experienced.
  • Antecedent-Focused strategies
  • Response-focused strategies

Emotional Intelligence

• Emotional Intelligence is the ability to self manage emotions and the emotions of others to influence behaviour
• Dimensions include:
  • self-awareness is knowing where you stand in terms of emotion
  • social awareness is when you are aware to social tendencies
  • relationship management is where positive connections with everyone is key
  • self-management is knowing how to control emotions

Emotions and Ethics

• Research on moral emotions questions the previous belief that emotional decision making is based on higher-level cognitive processes.
• Our beliefs are shaped by our groups, resulting in unconscious responses and a shared moral emotion.
• May allow us to justify pure reactions

Attitudes and Behaviour

• Attitudes are learned tendencies responding positively or negatively.
  • This involves belief, emotions, and actual reaction
• Cognitive dissonance: is the stress/discomfort when values and attitudes don't line up
  • This is solved by justifying actions in ones mind
• Workplace attitudes are:
  • Job satisfication
  • Employee engagement
  • Oranizational commitment

Workplace Stress

• Stress impacts someone when they feel like they cannot handle responsibilities
• About 60% of sicknesses are due to stress

Two Main Stressors

• Challenges are work-related demands that contribute to gains.
• Hindrances are considered to constrain
• The job demand resource model includes:
• Job demands : work load, pressures, ect
• Job resources : assets, support

Stressful Situations

• Workplace situations lead to good or bad stressors
• "Eustress : Good stress like, hitting a deadline"
• "Distress : bad stress like, job burnout"
• Wellness is a healthy life choice, which include
• Ways to meditate
• Breath deeply
• Be present
• Reach out
• Exercise
• Ways to cope and control stress
• problem focused coping
• emotion focused coping
• Companies provide wellness programs for stress reduction