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 situation with two choices, neither of which resolves things in a way that's fully ethically acceptable, is called this.
Ethical dilemma
A new hire believes strongly that recycling at work matters, but keeps forgetting to actually sort his trash — and feels uncomfortable noticing the gap between what he believes and what he does. This psychological discomfort is called this.
Cognitive dissonance
Self-efficacy, self-esteem, locus of control, and emotional stability combine into one broader personality trait called this.
Core self-evaluations (CSEs)?
After meeting one new coworker who happens to be an engineer, Daniel immediately assumes she must be great at math "like all engineers," without any actual evidence. This first step of stereotype formation — sorting people into groups by a shared trait — is called this
Categorization
Motivation that comes from the positive internal feelings generated by doing a task well — rather than from an external reward like money or recognition — is called this
Intrinsic motivation
Janice is evaluating her department and doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so she rates everyone high on every dimension. This rater error is called this.
Leniency error
A hospital sets a goal rewarding staff purely for processing claims fast, with no accuracy check — and billing errors spike. This cause of unethical behavior, where the goal itself encourages the wrong conduct, is called this.
Ill-conceived goals
Even though Marcus personally supports recycling at work, he rarely does it because his officemates mock anyone who bothers. In Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior, the social pressure holding him back is called this.
Subjective norm
After being passed over for a promotion, Derek tells his friends the whole process was rigged by upper management and there was nothing he could have done. His explanation reflects this type of locus of control.
External locus of control
Unlike affirmative action, which corrects past imbalances, this broader organizational approach enables people to perform up to their maximum potential by changing an organization's culture and infrastructure.
Managing diversity
In Herzberg's theory, factors like salary, company policy, and working conditions can move a person from dissatisfied to not dissatisfied, but can't by themselves create true satisfaction. These are called this
Hygiene factors
Gathering performance input from peers, supervisors, subordinates, and even outsiders — not just a single boss — is called this type of feedback
360-degree feedback
Before jumping to recommendations, the first step of the textbook's 3-Step Problem-Solving Approach asks you to do this.
Define the problem
This workplace attitude is defined as an affective or emotional response toward various facets of one's job.
Job satisfaction
The ability to monitor one's own emotions and those of others, discriminate among them, and use that information to guide thinking and action is called this.
Emotional intelligence (EI)?
A regional bank in a fast-growing Latino community deliberately hires and promotes bilingual, Latino employees so its staff mirrors its customer base. This diversity perspective, based on recognizing that an organization's markets are culturally diverse, is called this.
Access-and-legitimacy perspective
Goal-setting theory says goals work partly by doing this to a person's attention — pointing it toward what matters and away from distractions.
Directing (attention)?
A manager lets an employee skip an unpleasant task once she finally turns in her reports on time, which makes the on-time behavior more likely to continue. Withdrawing something displeasing to strengthen a behavior is called this
Negative reinforcement
This perspective holds that behavior is a function of interdependent person factors and situation factors — not one or the other alone.
Interactional perspective
Staying late to help a new coworker learn the ropes isn't in anyone's job description and isn't formally rewarded — but it still helps the team run better. This kind of discretionary, helpful behavior is called this.
Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)
What a person actually experiences internally versus what that person outwardly shows to others are two different categories of this.
Felt and displayed emotions
This term describes an invisible but absolute barrier that prevents women from advancing to higher-level positions.
Glass ceiling
A hospital housekeeper starts greeting patients by name and sees herself as part of the care team, even though her official duties haven't changed. This bottom-up reshaping of how someone sees or approaches their job is called this.
Job crafting
A sense of accomplishment or personal pride someone feels just from doing meaningful work — rather than from a paycheck or bonus — is an example of this type of reward.
Intrinsic reward
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