Chapter 13

Understanding and Managing

Individual Behavior

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 Learning Objectives

13.1 Identify the focus and goals of individual behavior within

organizations.
13.2 Explain the role that attitudes play in job performance.
13.3 Describe different personality theories.
15.4 Describe perception and the factors that influence it.
Focus and Goals of Organizational Behavior

• Managers need good people skills

• Behavior: the actions of people
• Organizational behavior: the study of the actions of people at
work
“Organization as an Iceberg” Metaphor

Exhibit 13.1 shows that like an iceberg, O B has a small visible dimension and a
much larger hidden portion.
Copyright © 2021, 2018, 2016 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
 Focus of Organizational Behavior
• Individual behavior : Based predominantly on
contributions from psychologists, this area includes topics
such as attitudes, personality, perception, learning, and
motivation
• Group behavior :which includes norms, roles, team
building, leadership, and conflict. Our knowledge about
groups comes basically from the work of sociologists and
social psychologists.
• Organizational aspects: including structure, culture, and
human resource policies and practices.
 Goals of Organizational
Behavior
The goals of OB are to explain, predict, and influence behavior.
Managers need to be able to explain why employees engage in
some behaviors rather than others, predict how employees will
respond to various actions and decisions, and influence how
employees behave.
• Six important ones have been identified: employee
productivity, absenteeism, turnover, organizational citizenship
behavior (OCB), job satisfaction, and workplace misbehavior
[Link] productivity is a performance measure of both efficiency and effectiveness.
Managers want to know what factors will influence the efficiency and effectiveness of
employees.
[Link] is the failure to show up for work. It’s difficult for work to get done if
employees don’t show up.
[Link] is the voluntary and involuntary permanent withdrawal from an organization. It
can be a problem because of increased recruiting, selection, and training costs and work
disruptions.
4. Organizational citizenship behavior (O C B): discretionary behavior that is not part of an
employee’s formal job requirements, but which promotes the effective functioning of the
organization
5. Job satisfaction refers to an employee’s general attitude toward his or her job. Although job
satisfaction is an attitude rather than a behavior, it’s an outcome that concerns many
managers because satisfied employees are more likely to show up for work, have higher levels
of performance, and stay with an organization.
6. Counterproductive workplace behavior is any intentional employee behavior that is
potentially harmful to the organization or individuals within the organization. Workplace
misbehavior shows up in organizations in four ways: deviance, aggression, antisocial behavior,
and violence. Such behaviors can range from playing loud music just to irritate coworkers to
verbal aggression to sabotaging work, all of which can create havoc in any organization.
 Attitudes and Job Performance

Attitudes: evaluative statements, either favorable or

unfavorable, concerning objects, people, or events
[Link] component: that part of an attitude that’s made up of the
beliefs, opinions, knowledge, or information held by a person.
“discrimination is wrong”
2. Affective component: that part of an attitude that’s the emotional
or feeling part. The affective component of an attitude is the
emotional or feeling part of an attitude.
“I don’t like Pat because he discriminates against minorities.”
3. Behavioral component: Finally, affect can lead to behavioral
outcomes. The behavioral component of an attitude refers to an
intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something
 Job Satisfaction

• A person with a high level of job satisfaction has a positive attitude toward his
or her job. A person who is dissatisfied has a negative attitude.
• When people speak of employee attitudes, they usually are referring to job
satisfaction.
• High level of satisfaction = positive attitude
• Dissatisfaction = negative attitude
• Linked to:
• Productivity
• Absenteeism
• Turnover
• Customer satisfaction
• OCB
 Job Involvement and Organizational
Commitment
 Job involvement: is the degree to which an employee identifies with his or her
job, actively participates in it, and considers his or her job performance to be
important to his or her self-worth.
• Employees with a high level of job involvement strongly identify with and really
care about the kind of work they do. Their positive attitude leads them to
contribute in positive ways to their work
 Organizational commitment: the degree to which an employee identifies with a
particular organization and its goals and wishes to maintain membership in that
organization.
• Whereas job involvement is identifying with your job, organizational commitment
is identifying with your employing organization.
• Perceived organizational support—employees’ general belief that their
organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being—shows
that the commitment of the organization to the employee can be beneficial. High
levels of perceived organizational support lead to increased job satisfaction and
lower turnover.
 Employee engagement: when employees are connected to, satisfied with, and
enthusiastic about their jobs.
• Highly engaged employees are passionate about and deeply connected to their work.
Cognitive dissonance: any incompatibility or inconsistency between attitudes or between
behavior and attitudes
• Cognitive dissonance theory sought to explain the relationship between attitudes and
behavior.
• It is any incompatibility or inconsistency between attitudes or between behavior and
attitudes. The theory argued that inconsistency is uncomfortable and that individuals will
try to reduce the discomfort and thus, the dissonance.
• Many organizations regularly survey their employees about their attitudes.
• Typically, attitude surveys present the employee with a set of statements or questions
eliciting how they feel about their jobs, work groups, supervisors, or the organization.
Ideally, the items will be designed to obtain the specific information that managers
desire.
• An attitude score is achieved by summing up responses to individual questionnaire items.
These scores can then be averaged for work groups, departments, divisions, or the
 Implications for Managers
• Managers should be interested in their employees’
attitudes because they influence behavior.

Satisfied and committed employees, for instance,

have lower rates of turnover and absenteeism.
If managers want to keep resignations and absences
down—especially among their more productive
employees—they’ll want to do things that generate
positive job attitudes.
 Personality
• Personality: the unique combination of emotional, thought, and behavioral
patterns that affect how a person reacts to situations and interacts with
others.
• It’s our natural way of doing things and relating to others.
• Personality is most often described in terms of measurable traits a person
exhibits.
• Affects how and why people behave the way they do.
 M B T I [Myers-Briggs Type Indicator]

• The MBT I® is a popular personality-assessment instrument.

• This 100-question assessment asks people how they usually
act or feel in different situations.
• It classifies individuals as exhibiting a preference in four
categories:
• Extraversion or introversion (E or I)(Social interaction)
• Sensing or intuition (S or N)(Preference for gathering data)
• Thinking or feeling (T or F)(Preference for decision
making)
• Judging or perceiving (J or P)(Style of making decisions)
 Exhibit 13.3 Examples of M B T I®
Personality Types
Type Description
I–S–F–P (introversion, sensing, feeling, Sensitive, kind, modest, shy, and quietly friendly. Such people
perceiving) strongly dislike disagreements and will avoid them. They are loyal
followers and quite often are relaxed about getting things done.

E–N–T–J (extraversion, intuition, thinking, Warm, friendly, candid, and decisive; also skilled in anything that
judging) requires reasoning and intelligent talk but may sometimes
overestimate what they are capable of doing.

Each personality type would approach work and relationships

differently—neither one better than the other, just different.
 The Big Five Model
In recent years, research has shown that five basic personality dimensions
underlie all others and encompass most of the significant variation in human
personality.
1. Extraversion: The degree to which someone is sociable, talkative, assertive, and
comfortable in relationships with others.
2. Agreeableness: The degree to which someone is good-natured, cooperative, and
trusting.
3. Conscientiousness: The degree to which someone is reliable, responsible, dependable,
persistent, and achievement oriented.
4. Emotional stability: The degree to which someone is calm, enthusiastic, and secure
(positive) or tense, nervous, depressed, and insecure (negative).
5. Openness to experience: The degree to which someone has a wide range of interests and
is imaginative, fascinated with novelty, artistically sensitive, and intellectual.
 The Dark Triad
• Three negative traits are dubbed the Dark Triad.
1. Machiavellianism: a measure of the degree to which people are
pragmatic, maintain emotional distance, and believe that ends
justify means
2. Narcissism: a person with a grandiose sense of self-importance
that is arrogant and requires excessive admiration. They also can
be hypersensitive and easy to anger. Ironically, narcissists are
more likely to be chosen for leadership positions because others
tend to see them as charismatic.
3. Psychopathy: a person who lacks concern for others and lacks
guilt or remorse when their actions cause harm to others. These
people tend to be antisocial. And when put in leadership
positions, they rely heavily on threats, manipulation, and
bullying as a means to influence others.
 Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
 Emotions: intense feelings that are directed at someone or
something
 Emotional intelligence: the ability to notice and to manage
emotional cues and information.
• Emotional Intelligence is composed of five dimensions:
Self-awareness: The ability to be aware of what you’re feeling.
Self-management: The ability to manage one’s own emotions and
impulses.
Self-motivation: The ability to persist in the face of setbacks and
failures.
Empathy: The ability to sense how others are feeling.
Social skills: The ability to handle the emotions of others.
 Implications for Managers: Personality

• Managers are likely to have higher-performing and more

satisfied employees if consideration is given to matching
personalities with jobs.
• The single best trait associated with superior job performance
is conscientiousness.
• The best-documented personality-job fit theory was
developed by psychologist John Holland, who identified six
basic personality types. His theory states that an employee’s
satisfaction with his or her job, as well as his or her likelihood
of leaving that job, depends on the degree to which the
individual’s personality matches the job environment.
 Exhibit 15.4 Holland’s Personality-
Job Fit

Theory states that an employee’s satisfaction with his or her job, as well as his or her likelihood of leaving that
job, depends on the degree to which the individual’s personality matches the job environment.
Copyright © 2021, 2018, 2016 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
 Perception
Perception: process by which we give meaning to our environment by organizing and
interpreting sensory impressions
• A number of factors act to shape and sometimes distort perception including:
• Perceiver
• Target characteristics
• Context
Research on perception consistently demonstrates that individuals may look at the
same thing yet perceive it differently.
One manager, for instance, can interpret the fact that her assistant regularly takes
several days to make important decisions as evidence that the assistant is slow,
disorganized, and afraid to make decisions.
Another manager with the same assistant might interpret the same tendency as
evidence that the assistant is thoughtful, thorough, and deliberate.
The first manager would probably evaluate her assistant negatively; the second
manager would probably evaluate the person positively.
The point is that none of us sees reality. We interpret what we see and call it reality.
And, of course, as the example shows, we behave according to our perceptions.
 Exhibit 13.5 What Do You See?

The characteristics of the target being observed can also affect what’s perceived. Loud people are more
likely than quiet people to be noticed in a group as are extremely attractive or unattractive individuals. The
relationship of a target to its background also influences perception, as does our tendency to group close
things and similar things together. You can experience these tendencies by looking at the visual perception
examples shown in Exhibit 13-5. Notice how what you see changes as you look differently at each one.
Copyright © 2021, 2018, 2016 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
 Attribution Theory
• Attribution theory: a theory used to explain how we judge
people differently depending on what meaning we attribute to a
given behavior
• Basically, the theory suggests that when we observe an
individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was
internally or externally caused.
• Internally caused behaviors are those believed to be under the
personal control of the individual.
• Externally caused behavior results from outside factors; that is,
the person is forced into the behavior by the situation.
• That determination, however, depends on three factors:
distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency.
Exhibit 15.6 Attribution Theory

Exhibit 15.6 summarizes the key elements of attribution theory

Copyright © 2021, 2018, 2016 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
 Attribution Theory
• One interesting finding from attribution theory is that errors or biases distort our
attributions.
• The fact that when we make judgments about the behavior of other people, we
have a tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and to
overestimate the influence of internal or personal factors.
• This tendency is called the fundamental attribution error and can explain why a
sales manager may attribute the poor performance of her sales representative to
laziness rather than to the innovative product line introduced by a competitor.

• This tendency is called the self-serving bias and suggests that feedback provided
to employees in performance reviews will be distorted by them depending on
whether it’s positive or negative.
 Shortcuts Used in Judging Others
• Selective perception: we make selections based on our own background,
experience, interests and other factors unique to us

.
• Assumed similarity: the assumption that others are like oneself or the “like
me” effect, the observer’s perception of others is influenced more by the
observer’s own characteristics than by those of the person observed.
• Stereotyping: judging a person based on a perception of a group to which that
person belongs
• Halo effect: a general impression of an individual based on a single
characteristic
• Contrast effect: our perception of someone or something can be
influenced by the context or surroundings
 Implications for Managers: Perception

• Managers need to recognize that their employees

react to perceptions, not to reality. Management is
also not immune to biases and can negatively impact
employees’ perception of fairness with inaccurate
appraisals or setting discriminatory wage levels
 Learning

• Learning is defined as any relatively permanent

change in behavior that occurs as a result of
experience
• Two learning theories help us understand
individual behavior:
1. Operant Conditioning
2. Social Learning Theory
 Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning argues that behavior is a function of its

consequences.
• People learn to behave to get something they want or to avoid something
they don’t want.
• Operant behavior is voluntary or learned behavior, not reflexive or
unlearned behavior.
• The tendency to repeat learned behavior is influenced by reinforcement
or lack of reinforcement that happens as a result of the behavior.
Reinforcement strengthens a behavior and increases the likelihood that it
will be repeated. Lack of reinforcement weakens a behavior and lessens
the likelihood that it will be repeated.
 Social Learning
• Learning comes from watching others (models)—parents, teachers, peers, television and movie actors,
managers, and so forth. This view that we can learn both through observation and direct experience is
called social learning theory.
• The influence of others is central to the social learning viewpoint. The amount of influence these
models have on an individual is determined by four processes:

[Link] processes. People learn from a model when they recognize and pay attention to its critical
features. We’re most influenced by models who are attractive, repeatedly available, thought to be
important, or seen as similar to us.

[Link] processes. A model’s influence will depend on how well the individual remembers the model’s
action, even after the model is no longer readily available.

[Link] reproduction processes. After a person has seen a new behavior by observing the model, the
watching must become doing. This process then demonstrates that the individual can actually do the
modeled activities.

[Link] processes. Individuals will be motivated to exhibit the modeled behavior if positive
incentives or rewards are provided. Behaviors that are reinforced will be given more attention, learned
better, and performed more often.
 Shaping: A Managerial Tool
• Shaping behavior: the process of guiding learning in graduated steps using reinforcement or
lack of reinforcement.
• Four ways to shape behavior include:
• Positive reinforcement: When a behavior is followed by something pleasant, such as praising
an employee for a job well done, it’s called positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement
increases the likelihood that the desired behavior will be repeated
• Negative reinforcement : Rewarding a response by eliminating or withdrawing something
unpleasant is negative reinforcement. A manager who says, “I won’t dock your pay if you start
getting to work on time” is using negative reinforcement. The desired behavior (getting to work
on time) is being encouraged by the withdrawal of something unpleasant (the employee’s pay
being docked).
• Punishment: punishment penalizes undesirable behavior and will eliminate it. Suspending an
employee for two days without pay for habitually coming to work late is an example of
punishment.
• Extinction: eliminating any reinforcement that’s maintaining a behavior is called extinction.
When a behavior isn’t reinforced, it gradually disappears.
Implications for Managers: Learning
• Employees are going to learn on the job: are managers going
to manage their learning through the rewards they allocate
and the examples they set, or allow it to occur haphazardly?