Personality Traits in the Workplace

Organizational Behavior Overview

• Organizational behavior (OB) is the study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself.
• OB aims to understand and predict how people and groups behave in organizations, and how organizational systems, structures, and processes shape behavior.
• Studying OB helps improve personal and organizational success by improving effectiveness at work, understanding human behavior in organizations, and developing a global mindset.

Managerial Context of Organizational Behavior

• Planning: Determining an organization's future position and strategies. This includes environmental analysis, goal setting, and strategy development.
• Organizing: Structuring jobs, grouping jobs into units, and establishing authority relationships. This includes designing organizational structure.
• Leading: Motivating and directing organizational members towards shared goals.
• Controlling: Monitoring and correcting organizational activities and member actions to ensure alignment with organizational goals.

Strategic Context of Organizational Behavior

• Competitive advantage: Creating a position for a firm that consistently provides it with an edge over its rivals. Sources of competitive advantage can include innovation, distribution, speed, convenience, and quality among other things.
• Financial risks: If the cost to produce the product or provide the service is more than revenue; a company may not be financially viable.
• Types of Business Strategies: Cost leadership strategy, Differentiation strategy, and Specialization strategy.

Technology and Business

• Technology: The methods used in the production of both physical goods and intangible services.
• Manufacturing: Combining and transforming resources into tangible outcomes.
• Service: Transforming resources into intangible outcomes that provide value to customers.
• Technology & Competition; Managing technology strategically helps compete favorably.
• Information Technology (IT): Advancements in IT have brought increased collaboration, more flexible operations, and improved management practices.

Ethics and Corporate Governance

• Ethics: Personal beliefs about right and wrong.
• Corporate governance: How a public corporation is overseen and directed by its board of directors.
• Ethical issues: How an organization treats its employees, how employees treat the organization, and how both treat other economic entities.
• Conflicts of interest, secrecy, honesty, and confidentiality are ethical considerations in organizational settings.
• Social responsibility: Businesses considering the moral obligations they have to society.

New Employment Relationships

• Knowledge workers: Employees who add value to the organization through their knowledge and expertise.
• Outsourcing: Contracting with third-party firms to do certain work.
• Offshoring: Outsourcing to third-party firms in other countries for cost reduction.
• Tiered workforce: Different groups within the organization have different contractual arrangements.
• Psychological contract: Expectations about what an employee and organization contribute to the relationship.

Individual Behaviors and Organizational Processes

• Individual differences: Personality attributes, perceptual processes, attitudes, values, and emotions that influence behavior.
• Person-Job fit: The degree to which an employee's abilities and motivations align with job demands and rewards.
• Person-Group fit: The degree to which an individual's attributes align with those of a work group.
• Person-Organization fit: Alignment between an individual's values and the organization's culture.
• Personality: Relatively stable patterns of behaviors and consistent internal characteristics.
• Locus of control: The degree to which individuals believe their behavior has an effect on outcomes, influencing their motivation and achievement-seeking behaviors.
• Self-efficacy: Belief in one's ability to successfully perform a task or reach a desired outcome, affecting motivation and persistence.
• Self-esteem: Feelings of personal worth, positively affecting motivation and overall job satisfaction.
• Machiavellianism: Behavior focused on controlling others and gaining power.
• Tolerance for risk and ambiguity: Comfort level with uncertainty and risk-taking.
• Emotional Intelligence (EI): The capacity to identify, assess, and manage one’s own emotions, as well as those of others. This is a significant trait affecting job performance,
• Learning styles/sensory modalities: Ways in which individuals perceive, process, and recall information – impacting how they learn and make decisions.
• General Mental Ability: The capacity for rapid and fluid information acquisition, processing, and application.
• Learning-based perspectives: Individual behavior and attitude modification through learning principles. Social learning, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and reinforcement.
• Attitudes: Complex factors reflecting beliefs and feelings about objects, individuals, or situations within an organization, which are influenced by our values, experiences, and personalities. The three components are cognitive (knowledge), affective (feelings), and behavioral (intentions and actions).

Motivation

• Motivation: A set of forces that direct, energize, and satisfy.
• Equity Theory: People look for fairness and equality in reward distributions, comparing their inputs and contributions with those of others.
• Expectancy Theory: Motivation depends on effort, perceived likelihood of success (expectancy), outcome value (valence), and the perceived link between performance and desired outcomes (instrumentality).
• Needs-Based Theories: Emphasize internal needs and motivations. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Alderfer's ERG Theory, and Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory aim to determine motivating factors.
• Goal-Setting Theory: Specific and challenging goals lead to better performance. Goal acceptance, goal commitment, self-efficacy, and a strong value-belief system influence achievement.
• Work-life balance: Maintaining a balance between work and personal life to avoid stress and burnout.

Job Design in Organizations

• Job Design: Structuring jobs to enhance employee satisfaction and productivity.
• Job Specialization: Dividing jobs into separate, highly specialized tasks. (May result in reduced employee motivation.)
• Job Rotation: Rotating employees among different tasks.
• Job Enlargement: Adding more tasks to a job to increase variety.
• Job Enrichment: Increasing responsibility, autonomy, and feedback within a job.
• Job Characteristics Model (JCM): Motivating potential is increased as tasks and responsibilities are identified, and jobs are more meaningful.