Ch1: Foundations of OB
This interdisciplinary field focuses on understanding and effectively managing people at work.
OB - Organizational Behavior
Schwartz's model of values organizes ten values along two basic, opposing dimensions — one pits openness to change against this value, which emphasizes order, self-restriction, and resistance to change.
Conservation
Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness are four of the Big Five personality dimensions. Name the fifth.
Neuroticism (emotional stability)?
This cognitive process enables us to interpret and understand the people, objects, and events around us — and it's rarely a perfectly objective one.
Perception
Motivation is typically broken into three components — the choices a person makes and the effort a person invests are two of them. Name the third: how long a person sustains effort toward a goal.
Persistence
This four-step management process involves defining performance expectations, monitoring and evaluating performance, and providing consequences based on the results
Performance management
Using logic and reasoning to develop and evaluate options, this pair of skills ranks among the top things employers look for in new hires
Problem solving and critical thinking
A manager who values universalism and benevolence — placing others' welfare above her own power and achievement — is high on this dimension of Schwartz's model.
Self-transcendence
A park ranger who excels at recognizing and classifying plant and animal species, but struggles with algebra, is likely strong in this type of intelligence.
Naturalist intelligence
Needs and goals, category-based knowledge, and experience with the target are all examples of this type of perception-shaping characteristic — traits of the person doing the perceiving, not the person being perceived
Perceiver characteristics
After a difficult financial year, an employee turns down a high-visibility promotion and instead focuses on simply keeping steady income and health coverage for her family. Maslow would say she's prioritizing this level of need
Safety (safety needs)?
Specific, measurable, attainable, and results-oriented are four parts of the SMART goal framework. Name the fifth — meaning the goal has a deadline.
Time-bound
Jorge always submits his reports on time and admits his mistakes honestly, even when it's inconvenient. Over time his manager relies on him for sensitive projects without double-checking his work. Jorge has built up a strong reserve of this quality, which earns trust from peers and managers alike.
Credibility (trustworthiness)
An employee believes her company's new policy is unfair, feels frustrated about it, and starts arriving late out of quiet protest. Together these three components — belief, feeling, and behavioral tendency — make up this broader psychological construct.
Attitude
Intelligence and core self-evaluations sit toward this end of the individual-differences spectrum — traits that are relatively stable and hard to change — in contrast to more changeable traits like attitudes and emotions.
Fixed (stable)?
Harold Kelley proposed that we judge whether behavior is caused by the person or the situation using three cues, including how others act in the same situation and how the person acts in different situations. Name the third cue — how the person acts in that same situation over time.
Consistency
An employee discovers a peer with the same experience and output is being paid more for the same role. This theory holds that employees compare their own ratio of outcomes to inputs against a comparison other's ratio, and react when the two don't match.
Equity theory
A professor reads her strongest student's exam first, then unconsciously grades the rest more harshly by comparison. This rating error is called this
Contrast effect
Instead of exhaustively comparing every vendor on the market, a purchasing manager picks the first option that meets her minimum requirements and moves on. This decision-making approach is called this.
Satisficing
Despite enjoying her day-to-day tasks, Priya is quietly job-hunting because she no longer feels invested in her company's future or mission. Priya is low in this attitude, which reflects identification with and involvement in an organization.
Organizational commitment
Job performance, job satisfaction, and turnover are three examples of this category of variables that individual differences are often used to explain or predict
Individual-level work outcomes
A manager assumes an employee who arrived late is simply lazy, without considering that she had a flat tire that morning. This tendency to overweight personal causes and underweight situational causes when judging others is called this.
Fundamental attribution error
A manager offering a bonus for exceeding sales targets needs employees to believe effort will lead to performance, performance will lead to the reward, and the reward is something they actually want. These three beliefs anchor this motivation theory
Expectancy theory
This principle states that behavior followed by favorable consequences tends to be repeated, while behavior followed by unfavorable consequences tends not to be
Law of effect
This state describes an employee who is enthusiastic about work and invests discretionary effort beyond the minimum — distinct from merely being satisfied with a job.
Employee engagement
A researcher notes that employees who came of age during a major recession tend to value job security more than their younger colleagues do. This illustrates that values tend to vary across this factor.
Generation (generational cohort)
Despite a rocky first quarter, a new sales rep stays confident she can hit her numbers because she believes strongly in her own competence and ability to succeed at the task. This belief is called this.
Self-efficacy
Age, race, and physical ability are examples of this category of diversity, which is typically easy to observe right away — unlike the attitudes, values, and personality traits that take longer to learn about someone.
Surface-level diversity
This model proposes that redesigning jobs around core characteristics like skill variety, task identity, and autonomy increases intrinsic motivation by making work more meaningful
Job characteristics model
Unlike a fixed schedule where reinforcement is predictable, these two reinforcement schedules deliver rewards after a varying, unpredictable number of responses or amount of time — and together they're considered the most effective schedules for sustaining behavior.
Variable ratio and variable interval schedules
A company picks the cheapest, fastest fix for a staffing shortage — good enough to get through the quarter, but not the ideal long-term answer. Of the three ways of handling a problem (resolving, solving, dissolving), this is which one.
Resolving
An employee's personal beliefs about what she's entitled to receive in return for what she gives her employer — separate from her actual written contract — is called this.
Psychological contract
During a group project, one student spots a scheduling conflict before anyone else notices, proposes a new way to divide the work, and pitches the fix to the professor without being asked. This describes someone with this kind of personality.
Proactive personality
The feeling that one's own cultural rules and norms are superior or more appropriate than those of another culture is called this.
Ethnocentrism
Competence, autonomy, and relatedness are the three innate needs proposed by this motivation theory.
Self-determination theory
In the SMART goal framework, this is what the letter S stands for.
Specific