Psychology of Expertise and Contracts

Characteristics of Experts

• Possess extensive knowledge bases.
• Perceive work with complexity.
• Combine analytical skills with intuitive reasoning.
• Understand the significance of invisible factors.
• React effectively to non-routine situations and make decisions under pressure.

Knowledge Base Section Focus

• Textbook focus should primarily on knowledge base during reading.

Law of Requisite Variety

• Individuals need to match the complexity of the environment they are in.
• Conceptual toolboxes can differ greatly between individuals.
• Subjective and objective realities may differ.
• Agreement on a theory is experienced by a small portion (12-15%) of people.

Psychological Contracts

• Individual beliefs shaped by organizations regarding terms and conditions of mutual agreements.
• Can be implicit or explicit contracts. This includes the expectations of employees and their organizations.
• Willing and unwilling participants.
• Inadvertent breaches.
• Disruptive no contract.

Individual and Organizational Motivation(Process Theories)

• Focus on how motivation is evoked, like Goal-Setting Theory.
• What organizations and leaders can do to motivate employees.
• Scientific Management Theory, popularized by Frederick Taylor emphasizes using science to simplify work.
• Emphasizes productivity, efficiency, and output.
• Workers need incentives, especially monetary ones.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

• Human motivation is driven by innate needs organized on different levels.
• Once a need is met, the next higher-level need becomes the focus.
• Lower-order needs (physiological, safety) are satisfied externally.
• Higher-order needs (social, esteem, self-actualization) are satisfied internally.
• Needs reside on different levels and become dominant after the fulfilling of the previous one.

Reinforcement

• Modifying employee behavior through rewards and punishments, often called operant conditioning.
• Reinforcement of certain behaviors makes them likely to be repeated.
• Includes positive (rewarding good behavior resulting in higher performance) and negative (removing an adverse consequence to increase behavior) reinforcement.

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation

• Extrinsic motivation is driven by external factors (e.g., pay or benefits).
• Intrinsic motivation is driven by internal factors (e.g., personal satisfaction or enjoyment).

Equity Theory

• People experience workplace resentment and competition if they feel unfairly treated compared to others.
• This can impact motivation negatively when individuals perceive injustices concerning distributive or procedural fairness.

Cognitive Evaluation Theory

• Extrinsic rewards can decrease intrinsic motivation for tasks that were originally inherently enjoyable.
• This can result in fewer feelings of control and autonomy.
• Intrinsic motivation is reduced when tasks are controlled externally and are originally associated with something meaningful.

Motivation (Psychological Force)

• The internal process behind behavior that is influenced by internal and external factors. This internal state drives individuals towards specific goals.
• Motivation is related as the main input affecting performance of individuals.
• Motivation is linked with performance and managerial issues.

McClelland's Need Theory

• Highlights power, affiliation, and achievement as primary drivers of motivation, revealing through TAT tests.
• The theory is based on stories written by respondents about pictures.
• Individuals have different levels of dominant motives which are usually unchangeable, therefore they are not always positive.

Need for Power

• Desire to influence and control others to be in control of one's environment.
• Can be for positive or negative reasons (socialized vs personalized power).

Need for Affiliation

• Desire for close relationships and friendly interaction.
• Can be a motivation, but also may negatively affect decision-making when goals or relationships are intertwined.

Need for Achievement

• Desire to accomplish goals and excel to take the best approach in solving problems.

Job Characteristics Theory

• Definition of internal work motivation: achieving satisfactory job results leads to feelings of accomplishment or positivity, conversely unsuccessful results can lead to negativity and feelings of unhappiness.
• Critical psychological states: Meaningfulness, Responsibility, and Knowledge contribute to job characteristics.
• Personal and work outcomes are the result of the critical psychological states which can lead to; high internal work motivation, high-quality work performance, high satisfaction in the task and less absenteeism.
• Job redesign techniques.

Personality

• Relatively stable psychological characteristics that affect how an individual behaves.
• The Big Five (CANOE): conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extraversion.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

• Classification of individuals based on four preferences: introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving.
• Helps understanding personality and potential communication tendencies.
• Classifies people into different preferences based on their personality types which can affect them in different aspects of their careers or organizations.

Interpersonal Communication and Perception/Attribution

• The processes of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory data to create meaning.
• Perception includes filtering, organizing, and evaluating external stimuli.
• Stereotyping, Halo effect / Horns effect (evaluation is influenced by a single positive or negative trait), Central tendency can all lead to distortions in perceptions.
• Active listening and avoiding biases are important communication skills.

Self-Serving Bias

• Individuals attribute success to internal factors and failures to external factors.
• This can cause problems in both personal and work relationships.

Fundamental Attribution Error

• We tend to overestimate the impact of personal characteristics (personality traits) and underestimate external factors when judging others' behavior.

Communication Mistakes

• These mistakes can arise from poor interpersonal skills and self-referential belief systems.

Johari Window

• A model with four quadrants (Arena, Facade, Blind Spot, Unknown) representing different levels of self-disclosure and feedback.

• Used to understand communication styles and improve self-awareness.

  Social Identity Theory

• Individuals build their identity through their memberships in groups and belonging to organizations.

Cognitive Dissonance

• Psychological discomfort experienced when holding conflicting beliefs or values.
• This causes feelings of discomfort or stress.

Individual and Organizational Learning

• Knowledge is learned based on facts, information and skills through experiences such as listening and reading.
• Power is related to the ability of influencing people to behave in a certain way.
• Organizational learning emphasizes the collective actions of the organization.

Learning Styles

• Different preferences in acquiring knowledge and information.
• Each stage of the cycle is highly significant and has its own corresponding learning styles, which can be useful tools in understanding the different learning styles and preferences.

Classical Conditioning

• A form of learning where an unconditioned stimulus is associated with a neutral stimulus until the neutral stimulus eventually elicits the same response as the unconditioned one. This process is crucial in understanding how the conditioned response is developed and maintained.
• This type of learning is passive and is important in understanding how humans associate things.

Operant Conditioning

• Learning through the consequences of behaviors.
• Reinforcement encourages repetition while punishment discourages.
• Important in shaping behavior and motivation.
• Positive, negative reinforcement and punishment techniques are different ways of changing an individual's behavior.
• Extinction is the process of removing the stimulus and reward.

Cognitive Learning

• Learning through internal thought processes and mental models.
• Rewards can be internal satisfaction or extrinsic incentives.
• Important in creating positive mental habits.

Organizational Learning

• The ability to learn, unlearn and relearn within an organization.
• The ability to acquire, process, apply and share knowledge across different levels of the organization.

Levels of Organizational Learning

• Individual, group, organizational, inter-organizational.
• This focuses on how learning takes place at a variety of levels in an organization and is based on ideas and procedures.

Organizational Learning Approaches

• Single-loop learning focuses on adapting to existing procedures within an organization.
• Double-loop learning helps question and possibly change the existing procedures in place.
• Triple-loop learning encourages the process of learning from one's own learning process to understand how to gain knowledge better.

Key Challenges in Organizational Learning

• Fear of investing in employees, long-term and challenging development activities, focusing on immediate tasks over long-term goals.
• Measuring learning or change.

Types of Learning

• Exploitation: refining existing procedures, activities, and organizational approaches.
• Exploration: experimentation and trying new forms of procedures, activities, and organizational approaches.

Explore the characteristics that define experts in various fields, alongside the psychological contracts that influence their behaviors and decisions. This quiz delves into the complexities of expertise, the law of requisite variety, and the nuances of mutual agreements within organizations. Test your understanding of how knowledge bases and psychological factors shape expert performance.