OB TEST 3

Personality

• The structures and propensities inside a person that explain his or her characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior. Personality reflects what people are like and creates their social reputation

Traits

• Recurring trends in people’s responses to their environment

Cultural values

• Shared beliefs about desirable end states or modes of conduct in a given

culture that influence the expression of traits

Conscientiousness

• Prioritize accomplishment striving (accomplishing task-related goals)

Agreeableness

• Prioritize communion striving (obtaining acceptance in social relationships)

Neuroticism

• Associated with negative affectivity and stress

Openness to experience

• Useful for creative task performance

Extraversion

• Prioritize status striving (obtaining power and influence)

Positive affectivity

• A dispositional tendency to experience pleasant, engaging moods such as

enthusiasm, excitement, and elation

Negative affectivity

• A dispositional tendency to experience unpleasant moods such as hostility, nervousness, and annoyance

Differential exposure

• Being more likely to appraise day-to-day situations as stressful, thereby

feeling that stressors are encountered more frequently

Differential reactivity

• Being less likely to believe that one can cope with the stressors experienced on a daily basis

Locus of Control

 Whether one believes the events that occur around him or her are self-driven or driven by the external environment

Extraversion versus Introversion

• Extraversion –

• Introversion --

--being energized by people and social interactions

– being energized by private time and reflection

Sensing versus Intuition

• Sensing –

• Intuition –

—preferring clear and concrete facts and data

—preferring hunches and speculations based on theory and imagination

Thinking versus Feeling

• Thinking –

• Feeling –

-approaching decisions with logic and critical analysis

-approaching decisions with an emphasis on others’ needs and _______

Judging versus Perceiving

• Judging –

• Perceiving –

-approaching tasks by planning and setting goals

- preferring to have flexibility and spontaneity when performing tasks

Culture

• The shared values, beliefs, motives, identities, and interpretations that result from common experiences of members of a society and are transmitted across generations

Individualism – collectivism

• The degree to which a culture has a loosely knit social framework (individualism) or a tight social framework (collectivism)

• United States scores 91/100 on the individualism scale

Power Distance

• The degree to which a culture prefers equal power distribution (low

power distance) or an unequal power distribution (high power distance)

• United States scores 40/100 on this scale

Uncertainty avoidance

• The degree to which a culture tolerates ambiguous situations (low uncertainty avoidance) or feels threatened by them (high uncertainty avoidance)

• United States scores 46/100 on this scale

Masculinity – femininity

• The degree to which a culture values stereotypically male traits (masculinity) or stereotypically female traits (femininity)

• United States scores 62/100 on the masculinity scale

Short-term versus long-term orientation

• The degree to which a culture stresses values that are past and present

oriented (short-term orientation) or future-oriented (long-term orientation)

• United States scores 26/100 on the long-term orientation scale

Restraint versus indulgence

• The degree to which a culture advocates for regulating the gratification of

needs (restraint) or freely gratifying human desires that relate to having

fun and enjoying life (indulgence)

• United States scores 68/100 on the indulgence scale

Ethnocentrism

• One who views his or her cultural values as “right” and values of other cultures as “wrong”

Typical performance

• Performance in the routine conditions that surround daily job tasks

• Conscientiousness is a key driver of typical performance

Maximum performance

• Performance in brief, special circumstances that demand a person’s best

effort

• Ability is a key driver of maximum performance

Situational strength

• The degree to which situations have clear behavioral expectations, incentives, or instructions that make differences between individuals less important

out of the big 5 Concienciousness is

the strongest correlation to organizational commitment

Trait activation

• The degree to which situations provide cues that trigger the expression of

a given personality trait

Faking

• Exaggerating responses to a personality test in a socially desirable fashion

Conscientiousness traits

Dependable, organized

Agreeableness traits

Cooperative, courteous

Neuroticism traits

Nervous, moody

Openness

Imaginative, creative

Extraversion traits

Talkative, sociable

Ability

 Relatively stable capabilities of people for performing a particular range of related activities

 ____ is a function of genes (nature) and the environment (nurture)

Cognitive Ability

 Capabilities related to the use of knowledge to make decisions and solve problems

 Examples: ACT, SAT

Verbal ability

• Various capabilities associated with understanding and expressing oral

and written communication

Quantitative ability

• Capabilities associated with doing basic mathematical operations and

selecting and applying formulas to solve mathematical problems

Reasoning ability

• A diverse set of abilities associated with sensing and solving problems

using insight, rules, and logic

Spatial ability

• Capabilities associated with visual and mental representation and

manipulation of objects in space

Perceptual ability

• The capacity to perceive, understand, and recall patterns of information

Problem sensitivity

• The ability to sense that there’s a problem right now or likely to be one in

the near future

Originality

• The ability to develop clever and novel ways to solve problems

Deductive reasoning

• The use of general rules to solve problems

Inductive reasoning

• The ability to consider several specific pieces of information and then

reach a general conclusion regarding how those pieces of information are

related

General Cognitive Ability

 The general level of cognitive ability that plays an important role in determining the narrow cognitive abilities

 Sometimes called g or the g-factor

Emotional intelligence

• A set of abilities related to the understanding and use of emotions that affect social functioning

Self-awareness

• The ability to recognize and understand the emotions in oneself

Other awareness

• The ability to recognize and understand the emotions that other people are

feeling

Emotion regulation

• The ability to recover quickly from emotional experiences

Use of emotions

• The degree to which people can harness emotions and employ them to

improve their chances of being successful in whatever they are seeking to do

Emotional intelligence is a useful tool for managers

• Reduces training costs by decreasing turnover

• Higher levels of performance for employees with high levels of emotional intelligence than employees with low levels of emotional intelligence

“Dark side” of emotional intelligence

• Emotional intelligence is positively associated with gossiping, harassment, and theft

• Emotional intelligence enables people to be able to influence how other people feel

Strength

• The degree to which the body is capable of exerting force

Stamina

• The ability of a person’s lungs and circulatory system to work efficiently while he or she is engaging in prolonged physical activity

Flexibility

• The ability to bend, stretch, twist, or reach

Coordination

• The quality of physical movement in terms of synchronization of movements and balance

Psychomotor abilities

• Capabilities associated with manipulating and controlling objects

Sensory abilities

• Capabilities associated with vision and hearing

Visual abilities

• Examples: near and far vision, night vision, visual color discrimination,

and depth perception

Auditory abilities

• Examples: hearing sensitivity, auditory attention, and speech recognition

Teams

• Two or more people who work interdependently over some time period to

accomplish common goals related to some task-oriented purpose

Group

• Collection of two or more people

Work team

• A relatively permanent team in which members work together to produce

goods and/or provide services

Management team

• A relatively permanent team that participates in managerial-level tasks that affect the entire organization

Parallel team

• A team composed of members from various jobs within the organization that meets to provide recommendations about important issues

Project team

• A team formed to take on one-time tasks, most of which tend to be

complex and require input from members from different functional areas

Action team

• A team of limited duration that performs complex tasks in contexts that

tend to be highly visible and challenging

Virtual team

• A team in which the members are geographically dispersed, and interdependent activity occurs through e-mail, web conferencing, and instant messaging

Task Interdependence

 The degree to which team members interact with and rely on other team members for information, materials, and resources needed to accomplish work for the team

Pooled interdependence

• A form of task interdependence in which group members complete their

work assignments independently, and then their work is simply added

together to represent the group’s output

Sequential interdependence

• A form of task interdependence in which group members perform

different tasks in a prescribed sequence, and members depend on only the

member who comes before them in the sequence

Reciprocal interdependence

• A form of task interdependence in which group members interact with

only a limited subset of other members to complete the team’s work

Comprehensive interdependence

• A form of task interdependence in which team members have a great deal

of discretion in terms of what they do and with whom they interact in the

course of the collaboration involved in accomplishing the team’s work

Goal interdependence

• The degree to which team members have a shared goal and align their

individual goals with that vision

Outcome Interdependence

 The degree to which team members share equally in the feedback and rewards that result from the team achieving its goals

Team Composition

 The mix of the various characteristics that describe the individuals who work in the team

Disjunctive tasks

• Tasks with an objectively verifiable best solution for which the member

with the highest level of ability has the most influence on team

effectiveness

Conjunctive tasks

• Tasks for which the team’s performance depends on the abilities of the

team’s weakest link

Additive tasks

• Tasks for which the contributions from every member add up to

determine team performance

Member Personality

 Personality traits affect the roles that team members take on, as well as how teams function and perform as units

 Big Five personality traits

• Conscientiousness

• Agreeableness

• Neuroticism

• Openness to experience

• Extraversion

Team diversity

• The degree to which team members are different from one another

Value in diversity problem-solving approach

• A theory that supports team diversity because it provides a larger pool of

knowledge and perspectives

Similarity-attraction approach

• A theory explaining that team diversity can be counterproductive because

people tend to avoid interacting with others who are unlike them

Surface-level diversity

• Diversity of observable attributes such as race, gender, ethnicity, and age

Deep-level diversity

• Diversity of attributes that are inferred through observation or experience,

such as one’s values or personality

Team Size

 Having a large number of team members is beneficial for management and project teams with complex and knowledge-intensive tasks, but not for teams engaged in production tasks

Team viability

• Team commitment; the likelihood a team can work together effectively

into the future

Hybrid outcome interdependence

• When team members receive rewards based on both their individual

performance and that of the team to which they belong

Team Processes

 The different types of activities and interactions that occur within a team as the team works toward its goals

Process gain

• When team outcomes are greater than expected based on the capabilities of the individual members

• “More than the sum of their parts”

• “Synergy”

Process loss

• When team outcomes are less than expected based on the capabilities of

the individual members

Coordination loss

• Process loss due to the time and energy it takes to coordinate work

activities with other team members

Production blocking

• A type of coordination loss resulting from team members having to wait

on each other before completing their own part of the team task

Motivational loss

• Process loss due to team members’ tendency to put forth less effort on

team tasks than they could

Social loafing

• A type of motivational loss resulting from members feeling less

accountable for team outcomes relative to independent work that results

in individually identifiable outcomes

Taskwork Processes

 The activities of team members that relate directly to the

accomplishment of team tasks

Decision informity

• The degree to which team members possess adequate information about

their own task responsibilities