HRM 360 Exam #1 (CSULB)

Organizational Behavior

The study of the many factors that have an impact on how people & groups act, think, feel, and respond to work &organizations respond to their environments.

What skills must a manager develop?

Conceptual, human, technical skills.

The ability to analyze and diagnose a situation & to distinguish cause and effect.

Conceptual skills

Human skills

The ability to understand, work with, lead & control the behaviors of people or groups.

Job-specific knowledge and techniques

Technical skills

Personality

A pattern of relatively permanent traits, dispositions, or characteristics that give some consistency to the way that people feel, think, and behave.

What is the Big Five Model of personality?

Five broad domains of personality that are used to describe it.

S - Sociability / Extraversion
A - Agreeableness
C - Conscientiousness
ES - Emotional Stability / Neuroticism
IO - Intellectual Openness / Openness to Experience

Extraversion

a personality trait that predisposes individuals to experience positive emotions and feel good about themselves and the world around them.

Neuroticism

People's tendency to experience negative emotional states, feel distressed, and generally view themselves and their surroundings.

Aggreeableness

The trait that captures the distinction between individuals who get along well with other people and those who don't.

Conscientiousness

The extent to which a person is careful, scrupulous, and persevering.

Openess to experience

The extent to which an indv. is original, open to a wide variety of stimuli, has broad interests & is willing to take risks as opposed to being narrow minded.

True/False: There are only five personality traits that exist in behavioral organization?

False, there are over 4,000 different personality traits.

What has more of an impact, on the development of personality, nature or nurture?

Generally speaking, this is a 50/50 split. This is not to say that there aren't outliers who disprove this. But there are so many factors that contribute that its difficult to have a definitive answer.

Typically, at what age is an individuals personality established by?

Normally, by your early 20's. This isn't to say that it can never be changed after this age. Often as people mature their personality also changes.

What are some elements that can cause for personalities to change?

-Traumatic Experiences

-Physical damage to the brain

*Drugs and alcohol

-Psycho-Therapy

Personality can be unconscious and therefore hard to identify flaws in it.

Our brain is constantly trying to save us from danger, so much so that it can blind someone from identifying bad habits.

Locus of Control

The degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of the events that happen in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control.

Internal locus of control

people who believe they control the events and consequences that affect their lives.

External locus of control

tend to believe outside forces are largely responsible for their fate & see very little connection between their actions & what happens to them.

A religious person who believes god controls their destiny is a good example of...

External locus of control

An atheist is more likely to believe in....

Internal locus of control

Self monitoring

the extent to which people try to control the way that they present themselves to others.

Self-Esteem

The extent to which people have pride in themselves and their capabilities.

What are some traits of Type A personality?

_Extremely Competitive

-Always has a sense or urgency

-Impatient, & sometimes even hostile

Type B personalities

more relaxed, easy going and less quick to anger

What personality trait is more likely to be associated with success in organizations?

Conscientiousness

Work values

Employee's personal convictions about what outcomes one should expect from work and how one should behave at work

Ethical values

one's personal convictions about what is right and wrong

What composes the nature of work attitudes?

-Job Satisfaction

-Organizational commitment

Perception

The process by which individuals select, organize, and interpret the input from their sense to give meaning and order to their environment.

Stereotype

A set of oversimplified and often inaccurate beliefs about the typical characteristics of a group.

Schemas

Abstract knowledge structures stored in memory that allow people to organize and interpret information about a given target of perception.

Perceiver's Motivational State

the needs, values, and desires of a perceiver at the time of perception

Perceiver's Mood

how a perceiver feels at the time of perception

social status

A measure of one's social standing obtained by combining factors such as education, income, and occupation.

impression management

an attempt to control the perceptions or impressions of others

Bias

The systematic tendency to use information about others in ways that result in inaccurate perceptions

Primacy Effect

biased perception that results when the first pieces of information that people have an inordinately influence in their perception of the target.

Contrast Effect

Biased perception that results when perception of a target person are distorted by the perceiver's perception of others in the situation.

A manager's perception of an employee who preforms averagely but is in a group that largely contains highly preforming individuals is less likely to be favorable, as opposed if the employee were in a group of average preforming individuals. This is an example of..

Contrast effect

Halo Effect

occurs when a perceiver develops an overall impression of a person or situation based on one characteristic, either favorable or unfavorable

True/False: internal locus of control is better than external locus of control personalities

False: It really depends on the specific situations and tasks that are supposed to be carried out

Machiavellianism

the degree to which an individual is pragmatic, maintains emotional distance, and believes that ends can justify means

knowledge-of-predictor bias

the biased perception that results when knowing a target's standing on a predictor of performance influences the perceiver's perception of the target

attribution theory

Theory that is mainly concerned with explaining why people behave the way that they do and what can be done to change their behavior.

internal attribution

the inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as traits, abilities, or feelings

external attribution

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the SITUATION he or she is in; the assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation

A salesperson just landed a major contract because his company is the only one to offer a specific product in this particular region, this is an example of...

External Attributions

If a manager believes that an employees low performance is because of the lack of ability, or that an employee is not making enough of an effort to preform well, he is assigning...

Internal Attributions

Fundamental Attribution Error

The strong tendency to attribute other people's behavior to internal factors.

Stress

The experience of opportunities or threats that people perceive as important and also perceive they might not be able to handle or deal with effectively.

What are some general sources of stress?

Personal stress, Job-related stress, Group-and Organization-Related Stressors, Environmental Uncertainty.

problem-focused coping

the steps people take to deal directly with and act on the source of stress

emotion-focused coping

the steps people take to deal with and control their stressful feelings and emotions

Physically what happens to your body when responding to stress?

Increase in adrenaline, heart beat, respiration, and oxygen intake. Blood flow shifts to your extremities. Pupils dilate

What is the fight or flight response?

a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival. In which you choose to stand your ground and fight, or run away in flight.

What are some ways in which stress can change?

Experience and training can reduce stress. But they can also add more stress.

Example of removing stress with experience

Getting on the freeway initially and as time progresses you loose fear.

Example of adding stress with experience

You had a horrific car accident recently and it is your first time driving since then.

Social support

The network of friends and family that help you get through tough social situations

How does social support help with stress?

The ability to share you experiences creates a catharsis moment, and allows you to "get things off your chest".

What is the perceptual process?

the sequence of psychological steps that a person uses to organize and interpret information from the outside world

Name the stages of the perceptual process

Sensation, Selection, Organization, Interpretation, and Response.

Judgement Shortcuts

A way in which our brains allow us to make decision. They can be beneficial or detrimental and are genetically inherited and happen unconsciously.

Burnout

a special kind of psychological consequence of stress that affect employees who are constantly under stress for extended periods of time.

What are some signs of burnout?

Feelings of low personal accomplishment, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization.

Role conflict

the struggle that occurs when the behaviors or tasks a person is expected to perform are at odds with each other

role ambiguity

the uncertainty that occurs when employees are not sure what is expected of them and how they should perform their jobs

overload

the condition of having too many tasks to perform

underload

the condition of having too few tasks to perform