W1: Intro to OB
Explain the contingency approach to OB
Answer: Manager adapts their management style to the employee/situation instead of assuming one approach for all
What does OCEAN stand for in the Big Five personality traits?
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.
What is the hedonic treadmill?
Answer: People have a relatively stable happiness set point. positive or negative events can change happiness temporarily, but people adapt and tend to return toward their original level of happiness.
This term describes someone who does not contribute to the collective efforts of a group but still reaps the benefits.
What is a Free Rider?
What are the two types of social influence that lead people to conform?
Normative social influence (conforming to be liked or accepted by the group). Informational social influence (conforming because you think others know something you don’t).
Differentiate correlation and causation, explain why the distinction is important.
Answer: correlation describes two associated variables, causation implies a change in one leads to a change in another. Important for determining causal relationships
What are the three primary ways to measure personality?
Self-reports, informant ratings, and personality artifacts/behavioural residue.
Differentiate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
Answer: intrinsic motivation comes from the task itself or internal reasons such as interest, achievement, purpose, or challenge. extrinsic motivation comes from outside the task, such as pay, bonuses, benefits, promotions, or other people’s expectations.
This type of situation arises when the collective interest of a group is at odds with the individual interests of each group member.
What is a Social Dilemma?
In the elevator video, a person turns to face the back just because everyone else did. Which type of social influence is this, and why?
Normative social influence. There’s no information to gain from facing the back. They do it to fit in and avoid looking odd.
A warehouse manager times different ways of packing boxes, identifies the fastest method, standardizes it for all employees, and introduces output-based incentives. what management approach is used?
Answer: Scientific management
In Behavior = Person x Situation, when is personality most predictive?
In weak, ambiguous situations and with strong personality-role fit
An employee receives a raise and is very happy at first. a few months later, the new salary feels normal and they begin wanting another raise. what concept explains this?
This phenomenon occurs when a group's performance is worse than the average individual's performance due to factors like time inefficiency, ambiguous responsibility, and conformity pressures.
What is Process Loss?
According to lecture, what are three ways that high socialization and conformity can hurt an organization?
1) It stifles creativity, because everyone thinks the same way. 2) The group becomes less open and adaptable, so it has a harder time with change. 3) It suppresses dissent, which leads to poor decision-making.
A firm studies top-performing employees and find they all came from ivy league universities, ignoring unsuccessful hires. From now on, they hire exclusively from these universities assuming it must lead to better performance. What error is the firm making?
Name four dimensions of Hofstede’s Cultural Values.
Power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance, and short/long-term orientation.
A student loves photography and takes pictures for fun. after clubs begin paying her to take photos, she gradually loses interest and says photography now “feels like work.” what effect is occurring?
Answer: The crowding-out effect, also called the over-justification effect. the extrinsic reward reduces the student’s original intrinsic motivation.
In small groups, engaging in this activity creates a bad reputation for free riders, making their behavior socially costly. Answer: What is gossip?
What is gossip?
A sports team makes new members go through a long, exhausting tryout and initiation. Name the concept and explain why it increases commitment to the group. Which study showed it?
Effort justification. People value outcomes they worked hard for. This is in the theory Aronson & Mills (1959): the strong embarrassment group rated a boring group discussion as more appealing than the mild embarrassment group did.
A company wishes to introduce a new incentive program. one executive insists it will work because it helped at their previous firm, the other reviews multiple studies, combining their findings, examines performance data, and considers employee feedback before making a decision. what two concepts are illustrated and how do they relate?
Why do different cultures have different values?
A daycare introduces a fine for parents who arrive more than 10 minutes late. instead of reducing lateness, parents become even more late. explain why this happened.
This philosopher famously argued that without cooperation, life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"
Who is Thomas Hobbes?
Give one benefit and one risk of high socialization/conformity in organizations. Then explain how conformity can lead a group to accuse the wrong suspect especially in the Murder Mystery activity.
Benefit: new members learn the culture and expected behaviour, which means less conflict and better coordination. Risk: it stifles creativity and dissent, makes the group harder to change, and leads to poor decisions. Murder Mystery: members who held conflicting, unshared evidence held back from raising it, either to fit in (normative) or because they assumed the majority knew better (informational).