Organizational Behavior - Chapter 4

Flashcards for key vocabulary and concepts from Chapter 4 of Organizational Behavior, 14th Edition, focusing on individual values, perceptions, and reactions in organizations.

Attitude

A person’s complexes of beliefs and feelings about specific ideas, situations, or other people, formed by personal values, experiences, and personality.

Cognition

The knowledge a person presumes to have about something; a structural component of attitudes.

Affect

A person’s feelings toward something; a structural component of attitudes.

Intention

Component of an attitude that guides a person’s behavior.

Cognitive Dissonance

An incompatibility or conflict between behavior and an attitude or between two different attitudes.

Organizational Commitment

The degree to which an employee identifies with the organization and its goals and wants to stay with the organization.

Affective Commitment

Positive emotional attachment to the organization and strong identification with its values and its goals; employees want to stay with the organization.

Normative Commitment

A feeling of moral or ethical obligation to the organization; employees stay because they believe it would be wrong to leave.

Continuance Commitment

Staying with the organization because of perceived high economic and/or social costs; employees stay because they feel they have to.

Employee Engagement

Heightened emotional and intellectual connection that an employee has for their job, organization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences them to apply additional discretionary effort to their work.

Value

Way of behaving or end-state desirable to a person or group.

Terminal Values

Reflect long-term life goals such as prosperity, happiness, a secure family, and a sense of accomplishment.

Instrumental Values

Preferred means of achieving terminal values or preferred ways of behaving.

Intrinsic Work Values

Relate to the work itself.

Extrinsic Work Values

Relate to the outcomes of doing work.

Intrapersonal Value Conflict

Occurs when an individual experiences conflict between an instrumental value and a terminal value.

Interpersonal Value Conflict

Occurs when two different people hold conflicting values.

Individual–Organization Value Conflict

When an employee’s values conflict with those of the organization.

Emotion

Intense, short-term physiological, behavioral, and psychological reaction to a specific object, person, or event that prepares us to respond to it.

Mood

Short-term emotional state that is not directed toward anything in particular.

Affectivity

The tendency to experience a particular mood or to react to things with certain emotions.

Positive Affect

Reflects a combination of high energy and positive evaluation characterized by emotions like elation.

Negative Affect

Consists of feelings of being upset, fearful, and distressed.

Perception

The set of processes by which an individual becomes aware of and interprets information about the environment.

Selective Perception

The process of screening out information that we are uncomfortable with or that contradicts our beliefs.

Stereotyping

The process of categorizing or labeling people on the basis of a single attribute.

Categorization

The tendency to put things into groups and then exaggerate the similarities within and the differences among the groups

Halo Effect

Forming a general impression of something or someone based on a single (usually good) characteristic

Contrast Effect

Evaluating someone by comparing them with recently encountered people

Projection

Seeing one’s own characteristics in others

First Impression Bias

The inability to let go of first impressions, particularly negative ones

Self-fulfilling Prophecies

Treating people the way we categorize them and having them react accordingly

Attribution

The way we explain the causes of our own as well as other people’s behaviors and achievements, and understand why people do what they do

Self-handicapping

When people create obstacles for themselves that make success less likely

Organizational Fairness

Employees’ perceptions of organizational events, policies, and practices as being fair or not fair

Distributive Fairness

Perceived fairness of the outcome received, including resources distributions, promotions, hiring and layoff decisions, and raises

Procedural Fairness

Addresses the fairness of the procedures used to generate the outcome

Interactional Fairness

Perceived fairness of interpersonal treatment and explanations received during the decision-making process

Trust

Expectation that another person will not act to take advantage of us regardless of our ability to monitor or control them

Stress

A person’s adaptive response to a stimulus that places excessive psychological or physical demands on that person.

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)

Identifies three stages of response to a stressor: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion

Eustress

Pleasurable stress that accompanies positive events

Distress

Unpleasant stress accompanies negative events

Organizational Stressor

A factor in the workplace that can cause stress

Task Demands

Stressors associated with the specific job a person performs

Physical Demands

Conditions associated with the job’s physical setting and requirements

Role Demands

Stressors associated with the expected behaviors of a particular position in a group or organization

Interpersonal Demands

Stressors deriving from group pressures, leadership, interpersonal conflicts

Life Stressor

Life change or trauma

Burnout

A general feeling of exhaustion that develops when an individual simultaneously experiences too much pressure and has too few sources of satisfaction

Work–Life Relationship

Interrelationship between a person’s work life and personal life