罗宾斯管理学双语教学讲稿14

14Foundations of Behavior1. INTRODUCTION.This chapter looks at a number of factors that influence employee behavior and what the implications are for managers.2. WHY LOOK AT INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR?Behavior is defined as the actions of people. Organizational behavior is the study of the actions of people at work. One of the challenges in OB is understanding issues that aren’t obvious because the organization is like an iceberg with its hidden aspects. (See Exhibit14.1)A. Focus of Organizational Behavior.Organizational behavior focuses on two major areas.1. Individual behavior2. Group behaviorB. The goals of OB are to explain, predict, and influence behavior.3. ATTITUDES.Attitudes are defined as evaluative statements concerning objects, people, or events.A. There are three components of attitudes.1. The cognitive component of an attitude is the beliefs,opinions, knowledge, or information held by a person.2. The affective component of an attitude is the emotional orfeeling segment of an attitude.3. The behavioral component of an attitude is an intention tobehave in a certain way toward someone or something.B. Managers are particularly interested in job-related attitudes thatemployees have. Job-related attitudes include the following.1. Job satisfaction is a person’s general attitude toward his or herjob.2. Job involvement is the degree to which an employee identifieswith his or her job, actively participates in it, and considers hisor her job performance important to his or her self-worth.3. Organizational commitment is an employee’s orientationtoward the organization in terms of his or her loyalty to,identification with, and involvement in the organization.4. A fourth job-related concept is organizational citizenshipbehavior, which is the discretionary behavior that is not part ofan employee’s formal job requirements, but promotes theeffective functioning of the organization.C. Attitudes and Consistency.Research has generally shown that people seek consistency among theirattitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior.D. Does the consistency principle mean that we can predict an individual’sbehavior if we know his or her attitude on a subject? The answerdepends.1. The theory of cognitive dissonance—any incompatibilitybetween two or more attitudes or between behavior andattitudes—was developed by Leon Festinger.2. Cognitive dissonance refers to any inconsistency that anindividual might perceive between attitudes or between behaviorand attitudes.3. This dissonance or inconsistency leads to an uncomfortable statefor the individual who will try to reduce the inconsistency.4. The desire to reduce dissonance is determined by (a) theimportance of the factors creating the dissonance, (b) the degreeof influence the individual believes he or she has over thosefactors, and (c) the rewards that may be involved in dissonance.5. Individuals reduce dissonance by changing behavior, concludingthat the dissonant behavior isn’t so important after all, or changethe attitude.E. Attitude surveys elicit responses from employees throughquestionnaires about how they feel about their jobs, work groups,supervisors, or the organization. Exhibit14.2shows a sample attitudesurvey.F. The Satisfaction-Productivity Controversy.There’s a controversy about the relationship between satisfaction andproductivity. Are happy workers productive workers?1. After the Hawthorne studies, many managers believed that ifyou kept people happy, they should be productive.2. A review of the research on worker productivity shows that ifsatisfaction does have a positive effect on productivity, thateffect is fairly small.3. Looking at contingency variables improves the relationship.a. The relationship appears strongest when the employee’sbehavior isn’t constrained by outside factors.b. Also, the relationship is strongest for higher-levelemployees.4. Studies that controlled for causal variations indicated that amore valid conclusion might be that productivity leads tosatisfaction rather than the other way around.G. The implication for managers from understanding attitudes is that thereis relatively strong evidence that committed and satisfied employeeshave lower rates of turnover and absenteeism. Also, the belief thatmaking employees happy will make them productive needs to bereexamined.4. PERSONALITY.Personality is defined as a combination of psychological traits that describes a person.A. There are dozens of personality traits. Two models for classifyingpersonality traits are widely used.1. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a commonly usedpersonality trait test.a. The MBTI measures four dimensions.1) Social interaction: extrovert (E) or introvert (I)2) Preference for gathering data: sensing (S) orintuitive (N)3) Preference for decision-making: feeling (F) orthinking (T)4) Style of making decisions: perceptive (P) orjudgmental (J)b. Combining these preferences provides descriptions of 16different personality types.c. Some examples of MBTI personality types are shown inExhibit 14.32. The other model is the big-five model, which is a five-factormodel of personality that includes extraversion, agreeableness,conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness toexperience.a. Research has shown that important relationships existbetween these personality dimensions and jobperformance.b. The big five personality traits are:1) Extraversion2) Agreeableness3) Conscientiousness4) Emotional Stability5) Openness to ExperienceB. Emotional Intelligence.1. Emotional intelligence (EI)is an assortment of noncognitiveskills, capabilities, and competencies that influence a person’sability to succeed in coping with environmental demands andpressures.2. EI is composed of five dimensions:a. Self-awarenessb. Self-managementc. Self-motivationd. Empathye. Social skills3. EI has been shown to be positively related to job performance atall organizational levels.C. Five specific personality traits have proved to be the most powerful inexplaining individual behavior in organizations.1. Locus of control is the degree to which people believe they are themasters of their own fate. It can be either external or internal.2. Machiavellianism is a measure of the degree to which peopleare pragmatic, maintain emotional distance, and believe thatends justify means.3. Self-esteem is an individual’s degree of like or dislike forhimself or herself.4. Self-monitoring is a personality trait that measures anindividual’s ability to adjust his or her beha vior to externalsituational factors.5. Risk taking refers to an individual’s willingness to take risks.D. Do these personality types hold for other cultures? We know that thereare certainly no common personality types for a given national culture.Howe ver, a country’s culture can influence dominant personalitycharacteristics of its people. This is particularly true for the personalitytrait, locus of control.E. The major value of a manager understanding personality differencesprobably lies in employee selection. Just as individual personalitiesdiffer, so too, do jobs. Efforts have been made to match the properpersonalities with the proper jobs.1. John Holland has developed the best-documented personality-job fit theory. (See Exhibit 14.4.)2. The key points of his model are that there do appear to beintrinsic differences in personality among individuals, there aredifferent types of jobs, and that people in job environmentscongruent with their personality types should be more satisfied.5. PERCEPTION.Perception is defined as the process of organizing and interpreting sensory impressions in order to give meaning to the environment.A. What factors influence perception? A number of factors operate to shapeand sometimes distort perception. These factors are found in thefollowing:1. The perceiver2. The target or object being perceived (See Exhibit 14.5.)3. The situation contextB. Attribution theory is a theory used to develop explanations of how wejudge people differently depending on the meaning we attribute to agiven behavior. The determination of the cause of the behavior (to whatdo we attribute this behavior) depends on three factors.1. Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays abehavior in many situations or whether it is particular to onesituation.2. Consensus refers to whether or not everyone who is faced with asimilar situation responds in the same way with the samebehavior.3. Consistency refers to the congruency in a person’s actions.4. Exhibit 14.6 summarizes the key elements of attribution theory.5. One of the most interesting findings of attribution theory is thatthere are errors or biases that distort attributions.a. The fundamental attribution error refers to thetendency to underestimate the influence of externalfactors and overestimate the influence of internal factorswhen making judgments about the behavior of others.b. Self-serving bias is the tendency for individuals toattribute their own successes to internal factors whileputting the blame for failures on external factors.C. There are four frequently used shortcuts we use in judging others.1. Selectivity refers to the process by which people assimilatecertain bits and pieces of what they observe, depending on theirinterests, background, and attitudes.2. Assumed similarity is the belief that others are like oneself.3. Stereotyping refers to judging a person on the basis of one’sperception of a group to which he or she belongs.4. Halo effect refers to a general impression of an individual basedon a single characteristic.D. The implication for managers regarding perception and its impact onemployee behavior is that they need to recognize that their employeesreact to perceptions, not reality.6. LEARNING.Learning is defined as any relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience.A. Operant conditioning is a type of conditioning in which desiredvoluntary behavior leads to a reward or prevents a punishment.1. B. F. Skinner is the person most often associated with operantconditioning theory.2. This theory proposes that behavior is determined fromwithout—that is, learned—rather than from within—reflexive orunlearned.3. Skinner argued that creating pleasing and desirableconsequences to follow some specific behavior would increasethe frequency of that behavior.4. People will most likely engaged in desired behaviors if they’repositively reinforced for doing so.B. Social learning theory says that people can learn through observationand direct experience. Four processes have been found to determine theinfluence that a model will have on an individual.1. Attentional processes, which mean that people learn from amodel only when they recognize and pay attention to its criticalfeatures.2. Retention pro cesses, which mean that a model’s influence willdepend on how well the individual remembers the model’saction.3. Motor reproduction processes, which describe how an individualcan perform the modeled activities.4. Reinforcement processes, which mean that individuals will bemotivated to exhibit modeled behavior if positive rewards areprovided.C. Shaping behavior is systematically reinforcing each successive step thatmoves an individual closer to a desired response. It can be a usefulmanagerial tool. Behavior can be shaped in four ways.1. Positive reinforcement is reinforcing a desired behavior byproviding something pleasant after that behavior.2. Negative reinforcement is reinforcing a desired behavior withthe termination or withdrawal of something unpleasant.3. Punishment penalizes undesirable behavior.4. Extinction involves eliminating any reinforcement that ismaintaining a behavior.D. From learning theory, managers should recognize that employees aregoing to learn on the job. Are managers going to manage their learningthrough the rewards they allocate and the examples they set, or allow itto occur haphazardly?1. How, if at all, does the importance of knowledge of OB differ based on amanager’s level in the organization? Be specific.Knowledge of OB is going to be important for managers at all levels of the organization because they’re dealing with people. Low-level managers are likely to be directly supervising employees, so they would need knowledge of attitudes, perception, and learning. Depending on whether they have selection responsibilities, they may need knowledge of personality. Middle-level managers are more likely to need knowledge of attitudes and personality as they may not be directly supervising employees. Finally, upper-level managers are likely to need knowledge of attitudes as they deal with structural design decisions and human resource management issues.2. “A growing number of companies are now convinced that people’s ability tounderstand and to manage their emotions improves their performance, their collaboration with peers, and their interaction with customers.” What are the implications of this statement for managers?If the manager’s company agrees with this statement, the manager must consider Emotional Intelligence (EI) as a necessary factor in employee selection, as well as employee training and development issues.3. What behavioral predictions might you make if you knew that an employee had(a) an external locus of control? (b) a low Mach score? (c) low self-esteem? (d)high self-monitoring tendencies?Employees with an external locus of control might be less satisfied with their jobs, more alienated from the work setting, and less involved in their jobs.Employees with a low Mach score would be overly idealistic, emotional, and concerned about fair and equitable treatment. Employees with low self-esteem would be more susceptible to external influence. Employees with high self-monitoring tendencies would tend to be more adaptable in adjusting their behavior to the demands of different situations.4. “Managers should never use discipline with a problem employee.” Do youagree or disagree? Discuss.Disagree. Discipline that is rooted in behavior theories can be quite positive and can be used as a means to promote acceptable and desired behavior. When disciplining, however, managers should keep in mind the implications of attitudes, perceptions, learning, and personality.。