Organizational Behavior: Individual Differences, Personality, Attitudes, and Emotions

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering individual differences, diversity, cognitive abilities, attitudes, personality models, locus of control, self-efficacy, emotional labor, and emotional intelligence.

Work Behavior

Anything a person does in the work environment, including productive tasks like writing emails or analyzing data, as well as nonproductive activities like daydreaming or socializing on social media.

Diversity

The vast array of physical and cultural differences that constitute the spectrum of human attributes, making people distinct from one another.

Primary Dimensions of Diversity

The six core and stable attributes that have a lifelong impact on employee behavior and attitudes: age, ethnicity, gender, physical attributes, race, and sexual affectional orientation.

Secondary Dimensions of Diversity

Changeable human attributes that include educational background, marital status, religious beliefs, health, and work experience.

Ability

A person's natural talent to perform a mental or physical task, which remains generally stable over time.

Skill

A learned talent acquired through training or experience to perform a specific task, which can change and develop over time.

Mental Ability

Often referred to as intelligence, it encompasses several cognitive subcategories including verbal fluency, comprehension, inductive and deductive reasoning, associative memory, and spatial orientation.

Wonderlic Personnel Test

A 12-minute, 50-question cognitive ability assessment administered by organizations to job applicants and recruits to measure mental ability.

Tacit Knowledge

Work-related practical know-how acquired through direct observation, hands-on experience, and trial and error rather than formal training manuals.

Job Analysis

The process of defining and studying a job in terms of tasks or behaviors and specifying the responsibilities, education, and training required for successful performance.

Attitude

A mental state of readiness learned and organized through experience, exerting a specific influence on an individual's response to people, objects, and situations.

Cognitive Component of an Attitude

The aspect of an attitude consisting of perceptions, opinions, evaluative beliefs, and logical thought processes regarding an object or person.

Affective Component of an Attitude

The emotional element of an attitude associated with feeling a specific way about a person, group, or situation, typically learned from parents, teachers, and peers.

Behavioral Component of an Attitude

The tendency or predisposition of an individual to act or behave in a certain manner toward someone or something.

Cognitive Dissonance

The mental discomfort experienced when an individual perceives an inconsistency or discrepancy between their attitudes/beliefs and their actual behaviors.

Job Satisfaction

An attitude individuals hold regarding their work, resulting from their perceptions of job factors and the degree of fit between themselves and the organization.

Personality

A relatively stable set of feelings and behaviors formed significantly by both genetic predispositions and environmental factors.

Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI)

A widely used personality assessment tool that organizations apply for team building, management development, decision-making, leadership, and career planning.

Big Five Personality Dimensions

A widely accepted taxonomy describing human personality across five core factors: extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.

Extraversion

The Big Five personality dimension describing an individual who is sociable, gregarious, assertive, talkative, and active.

Emotional Stability

The Big Five personality dimension characterized by the tendency to experience positive emotional states, such as feeling calm, secure, and relaxed.

Agreeableness

The Big Five personality dimension associated with being courteous, forgiving, tolerant, trusting, soft-hearted, and cooperative in team settings.

Conscientiousness

The Big Five personality dimension describing an individual who is dependable, organized, thorough, responsible, and hardworking; it is the strongest personality predictor of job performance.

Openness to Experience

The Big Five personality dimension reflecting broad interests, curiosity, imagination, creativity, broad-mindedness, and willingness to take risks.

Locus of Control

A personality trait that determines the degree to which individuals believe that their own actions and behaviors influence life outcomes.

Internals

Individuals who believe they are masters of their own fate and take personal responsibility for their successes and failures.

Externals

Individuals who perceive themselves as controlled by outside forces, luck, chance, or task difficulty rather than their own actions.

Self-Efficacy

An individual's personal belief in their ability to successfully execute and complete a specific task.

Magnitude of Self-Efficacy

The level of task difficulty that an individual believes they are capable of attaining.

Strength of Self-Efficacy

The degree of certainty (strong or weak) an individual holds regarding their capability to complete a task.

Generality of Self-Efficacy

The extent to which an individual's belief in their capabilities applies across different tasks and situations.

Creativity

A personality trait involving the ability to break away from habit-bound thinking to produce novel and useful ideas.

Emotion

A state of physiological arousal accompanied by changes in facial expressions, gestures, posture, and subjective feelings.

Primary Emotions

The eight foundational emotional states identified in workplace research: surprise, joy, anticipation, acceptance, fear, sadness, disgust, and anger.

Mood

A low-intensity, long-lasting emotional state that subtlerly influences daily behavior.

Mood Contagion

The automatic transfer of moods and emotional states from one individual to another within a group or workplace.

Emotional Labor

The effort required to manage, enhance, fake, or suppress emotional expressions to align with workplace expectations and job roles.

Surface Acting

A form of emotional labor where an individual regulates or alters outward emotional expressions without changing their internal feelings.

Deep Acting

A form of emotional labor where an individual actively modifies internal feelings to genuinely express a desired workplace emotion.

Emotional Intelligence (EI)

The ability to recognize and manage one's own and others' emotions to guide behavior, foster relationships, and achieve workplace goals.

Dimensions of Emotional Intelligence

The four core competencies of EI: self-awareness, empathy/social awareness, self-management, and relationship management.