Lecture 1
Is amputating the wrong leg a medical/skill error or an organizational/human error?
Organizational/human error
Define personality ?
Personality refers to the structures and propensities inside people that explain their characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior. Creates people’s social reputation - the way they are perceived by friends, family, coworkers and supervisors
What is motivation?
Motivation is a set of energetic forces that determine the direction, intensity, and persistence of an employees work effort
Define leadership
The use of power and influence to direct the activities of followers toward goal achievement
What is organizational behavior?
O.B. is the field of behavioural science devoted to understanding, explaining, and ultimately improving the attitudes and behaviours of individuals and groups in organizations
What is evidence-based management?
Basing managerial decisions and organizational practices on empirical data and scientific evidence.
Name at least one of the four types of preference in the MBTI test
Extraversion/Introversion, sensing / intuition, Thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving
What is the expectancy theory?
Effort leads to performance. Performance leads to reward. And Reward leads to personal goals
Name 2 of the 4 styles of leadership
democratic, autocratic, laissez-faire, transformational
Which personality trait has been proven to be significantly correlated across pairs of identical twins which is attributed to nature, not nurture?
Extraversion
What is a drawback to outcome-based teams?
May decrease feelings of fairness among members.
Name at least three of the five factor models of personality
Openess to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neurotiscism
What is the self determination theory?
The self determination theory states that people prefer to feel like they have control over their actions, so anything that makes a task feel like an obligation will undermine intrinsic motivation
name a job/workplace that benefits from an autocratic style of leader
military, teachers, (anything high-stress/structure)
Can leaders be trained to be more effective, yes or no? Explain
Research suggest that training programs focused on transformational leadership content can be effective. Extra: Results of study indicated that managers who attended session were described as more transformational by employees, as well as, employees rated higher levels of organisational commitment and branches experienced better performance in terms of credit card sales and personal loan sales.
Mention two scientific tools of an O.B. researcher.
Observation, Interviews, Surveys, Experiments, Meta-analyses
In debates about nature versus nurture, what is the commonly estimated proportion that genetics, or "nature," contributes to shaping personality?
Estimated 40-60%
What are some unexpected consequences of giving out incentives?
People may lose intrinsic motivation
Employees might focus on tasks to get bonuses and focus on their own interests
People might exploit the incentives ( example of the rat problem in hanoi)
Lower quality performance
Equity issue
which leadership style creates the most intrinsic motivation?
transformational
Explain Expectancy, Instrumentality, and Valence through the lens of motivation
Effort to performance (expectancy); Performance to reward (instrumentality); Rewards to personal goals (valence)
Give an example of a third-variable problem (that hasn’t been mentioned in the lecture) and explain it.
(Correct if listed two variables that seem correlated and the underlying variable that causes the two)
Explain the Holland Riasec model
Suggests that interests can be summarized by six different personality types, Realistic,investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, conventional are the 6 different personality types
Explain Hedonic Adaptation
Tendency for humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes due to the psychological immune system
name 2 disadvantages to the laissez-faire style of leadership
low productivity due to not having guidance, low satisfaction/motivation because their boss doesn't seem to care...
What is the formula for dissatisfaction?
(Vwant - Vhave) x Vimportance