Organizational Behavior Exam 1

Chapter 1 

How organizations are defined in OB

• Groups of people who work interdependently towards some purpose 

What OB knowledge improves our ability to do

• The organizations effectiveness (ideal state in which the organization has a good fit with external environment (open system), effectively transforms inputs to outputs (human capital), satisfies the needs of key stakeholders)

• Organizational effectiveness is considered the ultimate dependable variable in OB

What the three levels of analysis are

• Individual: Focuses on the behaviors, attitudes, and motivations of individual employees within an organization

• Team: Examines how groups of people within an organization interact and work together to achieve a common goal.

• Organizational: Analyzes the overall structure, culture, and processes of the entire organization. 

What is the ultimate dependent variable

• Organizational effectiveness

Corporate Social Responsibility

• Activities intended to benefit society and the environment beyond the firm's immediate financial interests or legal obligations

• Human capital, anchor, contigisee

Open systems perspective

• a view that organizations are not isolated entities but rather interact with and are influenced by their external environment, constantly exchanging resources and adapting to changes within that environment; 

Human capital

• Essential for survival/ success

• Difficult to find or copy

• Difficult to replace employee with technology 

• Improves organizational effectiveness; directly improves individual behavior and performance, performing diverse tasks in unfamiliar situations, and companies investment in employees to motivate them 

The contingency anchor

• Recognize that the effectiveness from other disciplines (not just created by OB research)

Deep-level diversity

• Personality, experiences without sharing 

• Learn from resumes, linkedin, and talking

Surface level diversity

• Individual differences that we can see (age, race)

Definition of motivation

• Stealing, absenteeism, helping colleague

Examples of Task behavior, counterproductive work behaviors, and organizational citizenship behaviors

• Organizational citizenship: cooperation with or helpfulness, supports work context, may have negative work consequences

• Counterproductive work behavior: voluntary behaviors that may harm the organization

• Task behavior: voluntary goal-directed behaviors, proficient, adaptive, proactive 

Organizational Values

• core principles and beliefs that guide an organization's culture, decision-making, and actions. These values shape how employees interact, influence leadership styles, and determine how the organization operates internally and externally.

The triple bottom line philosophy

• Care about not all the money but also the economic, social, environmental

Benefits of informationally diverse teams

• More team creativity, better decisions in complex situations, better decisions. Employee attitude and team performance 

The difference between direct employment relationships and indirect employment and what recent research evidence says about the direct employment relationship (hint - benefits of it).

• Direct employment: employee working directly with employer, higher work quality, innovation, and agility

• Indirect: outsource or agency work (consultant, independent agency)

- lower job satisfaction thank other employment types 

The impact that poor role perceptions can have on job performance according to the MARS model

• Poor role perceptions have a direct negative impact on job performance. 

• lead to confusion, inefficiency, stress, and disengagement, all of which reduce productivity and workplace effectiveness.

Chapter 2 

Define Personality

• Relatively enduring pattern of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize a person, along with psychological processes

Around what age personality stabilizes

• Young adulthood

• Age 30

Understand each of the Big 5 personality traits and be able to identify them

• OCEAN

• Conscientiousness: organized, dependable, thorough

• Agreeableness: trusting, helpful, good-natured

• Neuroticism: anxious, insecure, self-conscious

• Openness to experience: imaginative, creative, curious

• Extraversion: outgoing, talkative, energetic 

The dark triad and the three personality traits it identifies

• Sometimes predicts better promotions and pay 

• Narcissism: obsessive belief in one's own superiority, entitlement (low self esteem)

• machiavellianism: strong motivation to get what one wants at the expense of others 

• Psychopath: manipulate others, superficial charm, antisocial, impulsive, most sinister- do as they please and take what they want

Understand personal values and what they are

• play a crucial role in workplace attitudes, motivation, ethical decision-making, and company culture 

• affect how employees interact, how leaders manage, and how teams function within an organization

Understand value congruence and why it's important

• When our values align with those of the organization

• Similarity of a person's values hierarchy to another source

• Higher job satisfaction, loyalty, and organizational citizenship, lower stress, and turnover

Understand reasons why decisions and behavior can be inconsistent with our personal values

Know what ethics are and understand each of the different ethical principles

• Study of moral principles and values, whether actions are right or wrong, outcomes are good or bad 

• Utilitarianism: greatest good for the greatest number 

• Individual rights: everyone has the same natural rights 

• Distributive justice: benefits and burdens should be the same or proportional 

• Ethic of care: moral obligation to help others, being attentive to others 

Know the difference between individualism and collectivism

• Individualism: the degree to which people value personal freedom, self-sufficiency, control over their lives, and being appreciated for unique qualities 

• Collectivism: the degree to which people value their group membership and harmonious relationships within the group 

Chapter 3

 Self enhancement

• Motivated by self interest 

• Outcomes like better mental and physical health, higher motivation due to “can do” beliefs, but riskier decisions

Self esteem

• Extend to which people like, respect, and are satisfied with themselves 

Self-verification

• Stabilizes our self-concept 

• Affects perceptions, tend to dismiss feedback contrary to self concept, and motivated to interact with those who affirm our self-view

Social identity theory

• Define ourselves by our groups

What low complexity is and how it can affect people

• Low complexity: resources develop fewer identities better

• situations, tasks, or environments that involve a limited number of variables, roles, or perspectives. In an organizational context, it often means that employees have narrowly defined tasks, fewer responsibilities, and limited decision-making authority.

Self efficacy

• Belief that we can successfully perform a task (MARS factors) 

• ‘Can do’ belief across situations 

The three elements of Self Evaluation

• Self esteem, self-efficacy, locus of control 

The three characteristics of self-concept

• Complexity, consistency, clarity *

• Self enhancement, self verification, self-evaluation

Define perception

• The process of receiving information about and making sense of the world around us 

Define and understand selective attention

• Selecting versus ignoring sensory information

• Only pay attention to certain things and ignore everything else

• Affected by characteristics of perceiver and object perceived 

• Emotional makers are assigned to selected information

Understand what confirmation bias is

• Nonconsciously screen out information contrary to our decisions, beliefs, values, and assumptions and to more readily accept confirming information

Define categorical thinking

• Simplify information by putting it into groups

• Organizing people or things

Define stereotyping and understand why it is difficult to prevent the activation of stereotypes (why is it so hard for people to avoid stereotyping others).

• Assigning traits to people based on their membership in social categories 

• Automatic and deeply ingrained in human cognition

• Categorical thinking, fulfills drive to comprehend and predict others behavior, supports self enhancement 

Understand what stereotype threat is

• Stress or anxiety individuals experience when they fear confirming a negative stereotype about their social group 

Define and understand prejudice

• Preconceived negative attitudes, opinions, and feelings toward individuals or groups based on characteristics like gender, race, religion, age. 

• Different than stereotype because prejudice involves emotional or evaluative component leading to unfair treatment

Understand the fundamental attribution error (correspondence bias)

• Tendency to overemphasize internal causes (personal traits) of others actions and underestimate situational influences (external factors) when explaining others people behaviors 

• Employees, managers, leaders may unfairly judge others actions without considering external circumstances that could be influencing behavior                                          

Understand self serving bias

• Attributing failures to external causes, successes to internal causes

• Due to self-enhancement process

Understand the contact hypothesis

• Intergroup contact under the right conditions can reduce prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination between different grou[s in an organization

• Interaction reduces perceptual bias

Chapter 4

Define emotions

• Psychological, behavioral, and physiological episodes that create a state of readiness

• Nonconscious 

• Evaluation and activation

Understand how and why work conditions can influence employee attitudes and behaviors

• Work conditions refer to the physical, psychological, and social factors in the workplace that affect employees experiences, motivation, and performance. Play a crucial role in shaping employee attitudes, job satisfaction, and workplace behaviors

Understand cognitive dissonance

• Emotional experience caused by perceived incongruence of our beliefs, feelings, and behavior

• Violates image of being rational

• Emotion motivates consistency 

• What my value is and what I am actually doing (the gap between)

• Difficult to undo or change behavior, typically change beliefs and feelings about attitude object

Emotional labor, surface acting and deep acting

• Surface acting: pretending to be in a good mood when helping customer

• Deep acting: stay cognitive effort but emotionally better for you

• Emotional labor: effort, planning and control to express organizationally desired emotions (higher in jobs requiring to lengthy emotion display, intense emotions, variety of emotions)

Define emotional intelligence

• Individuals ability to recognize, understand, manage, and influence emotions

• Leads to better teamwork, leadership, emotional labor performance, decisions involving others, creativity mindset 

Understand EVLN Model

• Describes how employees respond to dissatisfaction in the workplace

• Exit: leaving the situation

• Voice: changing the situation

• Loyalty: patiently waiting for the situation to improve

• Neglect: reducing work effort or quality

Understand the relationship between job satisfaction and performance

• Moderately correlated, not a direct correlation 

• We think if we perform well we are satisfied, or if we are satisfied we will perform better

• Performance causes satisfaction (reverse causation) but performance often isn't rewarded

Understand the different types of commitment and be able to identify the type based on a situation

• Affective commitment: emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in an organization (lower turnover, higher motivation)

• Continuance: calculative attachment, leaving is difficult due to social/economic loss or lack of alternative employment 

• Normative: felt obligation or moral duty to the organization, applies norm of reciprocity

Define stress

• Adaptive response to situations perceived as challenging or threatening to well being 

• Prepares us to adapt to hostile environmental conditions 

• Eustress versus distress

Understand the strategies we can use to control the negative consequences of stress

• Remove the stressor, withdraw from the stressor, change the stress perceptions, control stress consequences, receive social support 

Chapter 5   

Define motivation (know the 3 forces)

• The forces within a person that affect the direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary behavior

• Intensity, persistence, direction

Understand employee engagement

• Employees emotional and cognitive motivation, particularly a focused, intense, persistent, and purposive effort toward work-related goals

Understand 4 drives

• Drive to acquire: seek, acquire, control, retain objects or experience

• Drive to bond: form social relationships and develop mutual caring commitments with others

• Drive to comprehend: satisfy our curiosity, know and understand ourselves and the environment

• Drive to defend: protect ourselves physically and socially 

Understand the difference between personalized power and socialized power

• Personalized: a type of power driven by self interest, personal gain and dominance over others 

• Socialized: a type of power used to benefit others, contribute to the organization, and inspire positive charge 

• Benefit of you vs the benefit of others 

Understand the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

• You work really hard on something because you want a promotion (extrinsic) 

• If you work really hard because you live it (intrinsic) 

Understand the expectancy theory model and how it related to motivation

• Explains how employees are motivated to act based on their expectations of rewards and outcomes. Individuals make rational decisions about their effort based on the likelihood of achieving desired rewards 

• E to P is the probability a specific effort level will result in a specific performance level 

• P to O is the probability that a specific performance level will result in specific outcomes 

Understand the social cognitive theory  

• Explains how people learn and develop behaviors through observation, imitation, and social interactions. Highlights how employees shape and are shaped by their environment, experiences, and behaviors of others 

Understand what credible feedback is

• Comes from a reliable source ( knowledgeable, no bias) 

Understand equity theory and the role of a comparison other

• How we decide if we feel fairness or not, who we compare ourselves to

• Comparing our ratios or selves to others to see if we are being treated fairly

The benefits of job rotation

• More skill variety, more multi-skilled workforce, better quality awareness, fewer repetitive strain injuries

Chapter 6

Define decision making

• The conscious process of making choices among alternatives with the intention of moving toward some desired state of affairs

Understand being able to identify decision making problems.

• Problems and opportunities are constructed from ambiguous and conflicting information

• Mental models, decisive leadership, stakeholder framing, perceptual defense, solution focused problems 

• Solution focused problems: framing problem with a solution based in it 

Understand how our mental models can impact our decision making

• Since they provide cognitive shortcuts, rigid mental models may lead to bias, resistance to change, and limited innovation, making it essential for leaders to challenge assumptions, embrace diverse perspectives and foster a growth mindset 

Satisficing

• Good enough option to the best (OB evidence)

Escalation of commitment and effective ways to minimize it

• Repeating or further investing in an apparently bad decision

• We have someone else pull the plug or be the decision maker 

Scenario planning

• Planning in advance so we don't have emotions in the way because we planned before

The illumination stage of the creative process

• When we have that aha moment- write it down

Employee involvement in decision making

• Gets us more committed to the decision

• Better employee commitment when they are involved in the decision making
  
  

Decision makers evaluate all alternatives simultaneously → decision makers evaluate alternatives sequentially 

Decision makers choose the highest payoff alternative (maximization)--> decision makers choose the “good enough” alternative (satisficing)

Blank is the extent to which people like and respect and satisfied with themselves 

• Self esteem (how much u like and respect yourself) 

Which of the following is most likely occurs due to confirmations bias

• Manager believes actions are correct and ignores evidence (pay attention to what confirms my belief and ignore everything else) 

Negative stereotype 

• Stereotype threat (so worried about coming to the stereotype that you actually do) 

unhappy with company parking situation, couldn't find reasonable parking and distance, recommended ways for his manager to solve this problem for him 

• Using voice, speaking up