BME 12 Human Behavior in Organization PDF

# BME 12: Human Behavior in Organization ## Chapter 3: Individual Characteristics ### People in Organizations #### Individual Differences: - Personal attributes that vary from one person to another. - Examples: personality, intelligence, learning styles, attitudes, values and emotions, percept...

# BME 12: Human Behavior in Organization ## Chapter 3: Individual Characteristics ### People in Organizations #### Individual Differences: - Personal attributes that vary from one person to another. - Examples: personality, intelligence, learning styles, attitudes, values and emotions, perception, and stress. - Managers should be aware of psychological contracts that exist between the organization and its employees. ### The Concept of Fit 1. **Person-Job Fit**: - The fit between a person’s abilities and the demands of the job, and the fit between a person’s desires and motivations and the attributes and rewards of a job. - The primary focus of most staffing efforts because job performance determines the employee's success. - Leads to higher job performance, satisfaction, organizational commitment, and intent to stay with the company. 2. **Person-Group Fit**: - An individual fits with the workgroup's work styles, skills, and goals. - Leads to improved job satisfaction, organizational commitment, intent to stay with the company, and critical in team-oriented organizations. 3. **Person-Organization Fit**: - The fit between an individual’s values, beliefs, and personality and the values, norms, and culture of the organization. - Influences important organizational outcomes including job performance, retention, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. 4. **Person-Vocation Fit**: - The fit between a person's interests, abilities, values, and personality and a profession - Greater adjustment and satisfaction when occupation meets needs. ### Realistic Job Previews (RJPs) - Provide accurate information about the job and organization, building trust. - Reduce turnover rates for jobs that departing employees say were not what they expected. ### Personality and Individual Behavior - Relatively stable set of psychological attributes that distinguish one person from another. - Managers should strive to understand basic personality attributes and how they can affect people’s behavior and fit in organizational situations, not to mention their perceptions of and attitudes toward the organization. #### The “Big Five” Framework (OCEAN): - **Openness**: - Reflects a person's rigidity of beliefs and range of interests. - Better performers due to their flexibility. - Encompasses a person's willingness and receptive perspective to accept change. - **Conscientiousness**: - The extent to which a person can be counted on to get things done. - Is often a good predictor of job performance for many jobs. - **Extraversion**: - A person's comfort level with relationships. - Extroverts tend to be higher overall job performers than introverts. - Are more likely to be attracted to jobs based on personal relationships, such as sales and marketing positions. - **Introversion**: - Less comfortable in social situations. - **Agreeableness**: - A person's ability to get along with others. - Better at developing good working relationships with coworkers, subordinates, and higher-level managers. - The same pattern might extend to relationships with customers, suppliers, and other key organizational constituents. - **Neuroticism**: - Experience unpleasant emotions such as anger, anxiety, depression, and feelings of vulnerability more often than do people who are relatively less neurotic. - Expected to better handle job stress, pressure, and tension. - **Benefits of the Big Five Framework**: - Encompasses an integrated set of traits that appear to be valid predictors of certain behaviors in certain situations. - Managers who can both understand the framework and assess these traits in their employees can understand how and why they behave as they do. #### The Myers-Briggs Framework: - Based on Carl Jung's work and first developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, to help people understand themselves and each other so that they could find work that matches their personality. - Uses four scales with opposite poles to assess four sets of preferences. - The four scales are: 1. **Extroversion (E)/Introversion (I)**: - Extroverts: energized by things and people. Their motto is, "ready, fire, aim." - Introverts: find energy in ideas, concepts, and abstractions. They are reflective thinkers whose motto is, "ready, aim, aim." 2. **Sensing (S)/Intuition (N)**: - Sensing people: detail oriented. They want and trust facts. - Intuitive people: seek out patterns and relationships among the facts they have learned. They trust their intuition and look for the "big picture.” 3. **Thinking (T)/Feeling (F)**: - Thinkers: value fairness, and decide things impersonally based on objective criteria and logic. - Feelers: value harmony, and focus on human values and needs as they make decisions or judgments. 4. **Judging (J)/Perceiving (P)**: - Judging people: are decisive and tend to plan. They develop plans and follow them, adhering to deadlines. - Perceptive people: are adaptable, spontaneous, and curious. They start many tasks, and often find it difficult to complete them. Deadlines are meant to be stretched. - The possible combinations of these preferences result in sixteen personality types, which are identified by the four letters that represent one's tendencies on the four scales. ### Other Important Personality Traits: 1. **Locus of Control**: - The extent to which people believe that their behavior has a real effect on what happens to them. - Control their own destiny. - Fate, chance, luck, or other people’s behavior determines what happens to them.  2. **Self-Efficacy**: - Our confidence in our ability to cope, perform, and be successful on a specific task. - High self-esteem but low self-efficacy for certain tasks. - A key factor influencing motivation and engagement in an activity. - **General self-efficacy**: reflects a generalized belief that we will be successful at whatever challenges or tasks we might face.. 3. **Self-Esteem**: - Our feelings of self-worth and our liking or disliking of ourselves. - Positively related to job performance and learning. 4. **Authoritarianism**: - The extent to which a person believes that power and status differences are appropriate within hierarchical social systems such as organizations. - Highly authoritarian people accept directives or orders from someone with more authority purely because the other person is "the boss." - People who aren't authoritarian may question things, express disagreement with the boss, and even refuse to carry out orders if they are for some reason objectionable. 5. **Machiavellianism**: - Describes behavior directed at gaining power and controlling the behavior of others. - Individuals are rational and unemotional, may be willing to lie to attain their personal goals, put little emphasis on loyalty and friendship, and enjoy manipulating others’ behavior. 6. **Tolerance for Risk and Ambiguity**: - **Tolerance for risk**: - The degree to which a person is comfortable accepting risk, willing to take chances and to make risky decisions. - A high tolerance for risk leads the organization in new and different directions. - A low tolerance for risk leads the organization to stagnation and excessive conservatism, or might help the organization successfully weather turbulent and unpredictable times by maintaining stability and calm. - **Tolerance for ambiguity**: - The tendency to view ambiguous situations as either threatening or desirable. - People who are tolerant of ambiguity perceive or interpret vague, incomplete, or fragmented information or information with multiple, inconsistent, or contradictory meanings as an actual or potential source of psychological discomfort or threat. - Related to creativity, positive attitudes toward risk, and orientation to diversity. 7. **Type A and B Traits**: - **Type A personality**: impatient, competitive, ambitious, and uptight. - **Type B personality**: more relaxed and easygoing and less overtly competitive than Type A. - Understanding the personality type of your coworkers and boss can help you to better understand and manage potential sources of work conflicts. - Recognizing your personality type can help you to identify work situations that are good fits for you. 8. **The Bullying Personality**: - Repeated mistreatment of another employee through verbal abuse, conduct that is threatening, humiliating, or intimidating, or sabotage that interferes with the other person's work. - Costs employers through higher turnover, greater absenteeism, higher workers’ compensation costs, and higher disability insurance rates, not to mention a diminished reputation as a desirable place to work. - Four times more common than harassment. - Comes in a variety of forms, but common to all types is the abuse of authority and power, stemming from the bully's need to control another person. 9. **Role of the Situation**: - The relationship between personality and behavior changes depending on the strength of the situation we are in. - Strong organizational cultures might decrease the influence of personality on employee behaviors by creating clear guidelines for employee behavior. - Weaker organizational cultures might allow greater individual employee expression, resulting in a wider variety of employee behaviors. ### Intelligence: - Many types of intelligence, or mental abilities, including general mental ability, information processing capacity, verbal ability, and emotional intelligence. #### General Mental Ability: - The capacity to rapidly and fluidly acquire, process, and apply information. - Involves reasoning, remembering, understanding, and problem solving. - It is associated with the increased ability to acquire, process, and synthesize information. - Strong association between measures of general mental ability and performance in a wide variety of task domains. #### Information Processing Capacity: - The manner in which individuals process and organize information. - Helps explain differences between experts and novices on task learning and performance, as experts process and organize information more efficiently and accurately than novices. - General mental ability influences information processing capacity. #### Multiple Intelligences: - Suggests that there are a number of distinct forms of intelligence that each individual possesses in varying degrees. - Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences: 1. Linguistic: words and language 2. Logical-mathematical: logic and numbers 3. Musical: music, rhythm, and sound 4. Bodily-kinesthetic: body movement and control 5. Spatial-visual: images and space 6. Interpersonal: other people’s feelings 7. Intrapersonal: self-awareness - Different intelligences represent not only different content domains but also learning preferences. - The theory suggests that assessment of abilities should measure all forms of intelligence, not just linguistic and logical-mathematical, as is commonly done. #### Emotional Intelligence (EI): - An interpersonal capability that includes the ability to perceive and express emotions, to understand and use them, and to manage emotions in oneself and other people. - Five dimensions of EI: (Daniel Goleman) 1. **Self-awareness**: being aware of what you are feeling 2. **Self-motivation**: persisting in the face of obstacles, setbacks, and failures 3. **Self-management**: managing your own emotions and impulses 4. **Empathy**: sensing how others are feeling 5. **Social skills**: effectively handling the emotions of others. - People differ in the degree to which they are able to recognize the emotional meaning of others’ facial expressions - Seven universal emotions are expressed in the face in exactly the same way regardless of race, culture, ethnicity, age, gender, or religion: joy, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, contempt, and disgust. - The ability to understand what others think and feel, knowing how to appropriately persuade and motivate them, and knowing how to resolve conflicts and forge cooperation are some of the most important skills of successful managers. - There is also controversy associated with the concepts of EI: - It's overly inclusive, lacks specificity, and it is not clear if it is simply a learned skill or an innate capability. - EI is simply a surrogate for general intelligence and well-established personality traits. - Studies have supported the usefulness of EI. #### Learning Styles: - Individual differences and preferences in how we process information when problem solving, learning, or engaging in similar activities. - Numerous typologies, measures, and models that capture these differences and preferences. #### Sensory Modalities: - One approach addresses our preference for sensory modality. - Sensory modality: a system that interacts with the environment through one of the basic senses. - The most important sensory modalities are: - Visual: learning by seeing - Auditory: learning by hearing - Tactile: learning by touching - Kinesthetic: learning by doing #### Learning Style Inventory: - Categorizing cognitive styles. - Kolb Learning Style Inventory: the most dominant approaches to categorizing cognitive styles. - Four basic learning styles: - **Convergers**: depend primarily on active experimentation and abstract conceptualization to learn. - Superior in technical tasks and problems and inferior in interpersonal learning settings. - **Divergers**: depend primarily on concrete experience and reflective observation.    - Tend to organize concrete situations from different perspectives and structure their relationships into a meaningful whole. - Superior in generating alternative hypotheses and ideas, and tend to be imaginative and people or feeling-oriented. - **Assimilators**: depend on abstract conceptualization and reflective observation.  - More concerned about abstract concepts and ideas than about people. - They also tend to focus on the logical soundness and preciseness of ideas, rather than the ideas’ practical values; they tend to work in research and planning units.  - **Accommodators**: rely mainly on active experimentation and concrete experience, and focus on risk taking, opportunity seeking, and action.    - Tend to deal with people easily and specialize in action-oriented jobs, such as marketing and sales. #### Learning Style Orientations: - Annette Towler and Robert Dipboye developed a learning style orientation measure to address some of the limitations of the Kolb inventory and identify key styles and preferences for learning. - Five key factors: 1. **Discovery learning**: an inclination for exploration during learning. - Prefer subjective assessments, interactional activities, informational methods, and active-reflective activities. 2. **Experiential learning**: a desire for hands-on approaches to instruction. - Positively related to a preference for action activities. 3. **Observational learning**: a preference for external stimuli such as demonstrations and diagrams to help facilitate learning. - Positively related to preference for informational methods and active-reflective methods. 4. **Structured learning**: a preference for processing strategies such as taking notes, writing down task steps, and so forth. - Related to preferences for subjective assessments.  5. **Group learning**: a preference to work with others while learning.  - Related to preferences for action and interactional learning.