Organizational Behavior: Foundations, Personality, Values, Perception, and Decision Making

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering organizational behavior definitions, management roles, personality traits, individual values, culture frameworks, perception biases, and decision-making models.

Organization

A consciously coordinated social unit composed of two or more people that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals.

Technical Skills

The ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise.

Human Skills

The ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people, both individually and in groups.

Conceptual Skills

The mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations.

Organizational Behavior (OB)

A field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness.

Evidence-Based Management (EBM)

Basing managerial decisions on the best available scientific evidence and thinking like scientists.

Psychology

The science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other animals, contributing to OB at the individual level of analysis.

Social Psychology

An area within psychology that blends concepts from psychology and sociology to focus on the influence of people on one another at the group level of analysis.

Sociology

The study of people in relation to their fellow human beings, contributing to OB at both group and organizational system levels.

Anthropology

The study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities, contributing to OB at the group and organizational system levels.

Contingency Variables

Situational factors that moderate cause-and-effect relationships and make the main relationship between two variables change under different conditions.

Independent Variable (X)

The presumed cause of the change in the dependent variable; the variable that OB researchers manipulate to observe changes in $Y$.

Dependent Variable (Y)

The response affected by the independent variable $X$; the variable that OB researchers want to predict or explain.

Productivity

A performance measure including effectiveness (achievement of goals) and efficiency (meeting goals at a low cost).

Absenteeism

The failure to report to work, representing a huge cost to employers.

Turnover

Voluntary and involuntary permanent withdrawal of an employee from an organization.

Deviant Workplace Behavior

Voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational norms and thereby threatens the well-being of the organization and/or its members.

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB)

Discretionary behavior that is not part of an employee’s formal job requirements, but nevertheless promotes the effective functioning of the organization.

Job Satisfaction

A general attitude (not a behavior) toward one's job; a positive feeling resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics.

Personality

The dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine unique adjustments to the environment, or the sum total of ways an individual reacts and interacts with others.

Heredity Approach

An approach arguing that genes determined at conception (such as physical stature, gender, temperament, and bio-rhythms) are the source of an individual's personality.

Personality Traits

Enduring characteristics that describe an individual’s behavior across diverse situations.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

A widely used personality assessment instrument that classifies individuals on four axes (Extroverted/Introverted, Sensing/Intuitive, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving) into one of 16 personality types.

Big Five Model

A personality assessment framework tapping five basic dimensions: Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience.

Core Self-Evaluation

The degree to which individuals like or dislike themselves, whether they see themselves as capable and effective, and feel in control of their environment.

Machiavellianism

A personality trait characterized by a pragmatic, emotionally distant style and a belief that ends justify the means.

Narcissism

The tendency to be arrogant, have a grandiose sense of self-importance, require excessive admiration, and possess a sense of entitlement.

Self-Monitoring

A personality trait measuring an individual’s ability to adjust behavior to meet external, situational factors.

Type A Personality

A personality style aggressively involved in a chronic, incessant struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time.

Proactive Personality

People who identify opportunities, show initiative, take action, and persevere until meaningful positive change occurs in their environment.

Values

Basic convictions that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite mode of conduct or end-state.

Value System

A hierarchy based on a ranking of an individual's values according to their intensity.

Terminal Values

Desirable end-states of existence; the goals a person would like to achieve during their lifetime.

Instrumental Values

Preferable modes of behavior, or means of achieving one’s terminal values.

John Holland’s Personality-Job Fit Theory

A vocational model identifying six personality types (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) proposing that fit between personality type and occupational environment determines satisfaction and turnover.

Person-Organization Fit

The perspective that an employee's personality and values must align with the organizational culture.

Power Distance

A national culture attribute describing the extent to which a society accepts that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally.

Individualism

A national culture attribute describing the degree to which people prefer to act as individuals rather than as members of groups.

Collectivism

A national culture attribute describing a tight social framework in which people expect others in groups of which they are a part to look after and protect them.

Masculinity

A national culture attribute describing the extent to which the culture favors traditional masculine work roles of achievement, power, and control, and where assertiveness and materialism are valued.

Femininity

A national culture attribute indicating little differentiation between roles for men and women.

Uncertainty Avoidance

A national culture attribute describing the extent to which a society feels threatened by uncertain and ambiguous situations and tries to avoid them.

Long-term Orientation

A national culture attribute that emphasizes the future, thrift, and persistence.

Short-term Orientation

A national culture attribute that emphasizes the present and the here and now.

Perception

A process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.

Attribution Theory

An attempt to determine whether an individual’s behavior is internally or externally caused based on distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behavior of others.

Self-Serving Bias

The tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors while putting the blame for failures on external factors.

Selective Perception

The tendency to selectively interpret what one sees on the basis of one's interests, background, experience, and attitudes.

Halo Effect

Drawing a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic.

Contrast Effects

Evaluation of a person’s characteristics that is affected by comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank higher or lower on those same characteristics.

Stereotyping

Judging someone on the basis of one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs.

Profiling

A form of stereotyping in which members of a group are singled out for intense scrutiny based on a single, often racial, trait.

Pygmalion Effect

A self-fulfilling prophecy where lower or higher employee performance reflects preconceived leader expectations about employee capabilities.

Problem

A perceived discrepancy between the current state of affairs and a desired state.

Rational Decision Making

A six-step decision-making model that describes how individuals should behave to maximize an outcome, assuming complete information, all options known, and maximum payoff.

Bounded Rationality

A process of making decisions by seeking satisfactory and sufficient solutions from limited data and simplified models that extract essential features without full complexity.

Intuitive Decision Making

A non-conscious decision process created out of distilled experience that results in quick decisions relying on holistic associations and engaging emotions.

Overconfidence Bias

Believing too much in one's own ability to make good decisions, especially when outside of one's own expertise.

Anchoring Bias

Using early, first-received information as the basis for making subsequent judgments.

Confirmation Bias

Selecting and using only facts that support a decision while discounting contradictory information.

Availability Bias

Emphasizing information that is most readily at hand, such as recent or vivid information, when making judgments.

Escalation of Commitment

Increasing commitment to a decision in spite of evidence that it is wrong, especially if responsible for the original decision.

Randomness Error

Creating meaning out of random events and superstitions.

Winner's Curse

A decision bias in competitive bidding where the highest bidder pays too much due to overestimating the item's true value.

Hindsight Bias

Believing falsely, after an outcome is already known, that one could have accurately predicted it beforehand.

Utilitarianism

An ethical decision criterion where decisions are made solely based on outcomes, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.

Creativity

The ability to produce novel and useful ideas.

Three-Component Model of Creativity

The proposition that individual creativity results from a mixture of expertise, creative-thinking skills, and intrinsic task motivation.