Attitudes, Emotions, Personality, and Group Behavior

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers key concepts from Organizational Behavior, including attitudes, emotions, personality determinants, group dynamics, and communication processes.

Attitudes

Evaluative statements—either favorable or unfavorable—about objects, people, or events that reflect how we feel about something.

Cognitive Component

The opinion or belief segment of an attitude, centered on evaluation (e.g., "My supervisor is unfair").

Affective Component

The emotional or feeling segment of an attitude (e.g., "I dislike my supervisor!").

Behavioral Component

An intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something, characterized by action (e.g., looking for other work).

Job Satisfaction

A positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics.

Job Involvement

The degree of psychological identification with the job where perceived performance is important to self-worth.

Psychological Empowerment

The belief in the degree of influence over one's job, competence, job meaningfulness, and autonomy.

Organizational Commitment

Identifying with a particular organization and its goals while wishing to maintain membership in the organization.

Perceived Organizational Support (POS)

The degree to which employees believe the organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being.

Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB)

Actions that actively damage the organization, including stealing, aggressive behavior toward coworkers, or being late or absent.

Affect

A broad range of feelings that people experience, which can be manifested in the form of emotions or moods.

Emotions

Intense feelings caused by a specific event, which are very brief in duration ($seconds$ or $minutes$) and action-oriented in nature.

Moods

Feelings that are often general and unclear in cause, last longer than emotions ($hours$ or $days$), and are cognitive in nature.

Moral Emotions

Emotions that have moral implications because of an instant judgement of the situation that evokes them.

Affect Intensity

A trait component referring to how strongly people experience their emotions.

Illusory Correlation

The tendency of people to associate two events when in reality there is no connection, such as the belief that weather affects mood.

Emotional Labor

An employee’s expression of organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions at work.

Surface Acting

Hiding one’s inner feelings and foregoing emotional expressions in response to display rules.

Deep Acting

Trying to modify one’s true inner feelings based on organizational display rules.

Affective Events Theory (AET)

A theory suggesting that employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work, and this influence affects job performance and satisfaction.

Emotional Intelligence (EI)

A person's ability to perceive emotions in the self and others, understand their meaning, and regulate them accordingly.

Emotional Contagion

The process of "catching" emotions from others, which can influence repeat business and customer satisfaction.

Personality

A dynamic concept describing the growth and development of a person’s whole psychological system; the sum total of ways an individual reacts to and interacts with others.

Heredity

Factors determined at conception, arguing that an individual's personality is explained by the molecular structure of genes located in chromosomes.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

A personality framework classifying people as Extroverted/Introverted, Sensing/Intuitive, Thinking/Feeling, and Perceiving/Judging.

The Big Five Model

A personality assessment comprising Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience.

Core Self-Evaluation (CSE)

Bottom-line conclusions individuals have about their capabilities, competence, and worth as a person.

Self-Monitoring

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

Proactive Personality

A person who identifies opportunities, shows initiative, takes action, and perseveres until meaningful change occurs.

Situation Strength Theory

A theory indicating that how personality translates into behavior depends on situational clarity, consistency, constraints, and consequences.

Group

Two or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular objectives.

Social Identity Theory

A perspective that considers when and why individuals consider themselves members of groups, linking self-esteem to group performance.

Ingroup Favoritism

A phenomenon occurs when we see members of our own group as better than other people and see those outside the group as all the same.

Role

A set of expected behavior patterns attributed to someone occupying a given position in a social unit.

Norms

Acceptable standards of behavior within a group that are shared by the group’s members.

Status

A socially defined position or rank given to groups or group members by others.

Social Loafing

The tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when working alone.

Groupthink

Situations in which group pressures for conformity deter the group from critically appraising unusual, minority, or unpopular views.

Groupshift

A change between a group’s decision and the individual decision that a member within the group would make.

Work Teams

Groups that generate positive synergy through coordinated effort, where individual and mutual accountability results in collective performance.

Grapevine

The informal communication network in a group or organization that helps identify employee issues and anxieties.

Channel Richness

The choice of a communication channel based on whether the message is routine or complex/lengthy.