in-class exam 1

• organizational behavior is devoted to understanding, explaining, and ultimately improving the attitudes and behaviors of individuals in organizations
• organizations are social inventions for accomplishing goals through group effort
• types of organizational behavior

  micro, meso, and macro
• micro level looks at the attitudes and behaviors of individuals and groups in organizations
• meso level focuses on how organizations can be structured more efficiently
• macro level deals with how events in the external environment affect organizations
• goals of OB

  predict, explain, & manage behavior and events in organizations
• all parts of OB

  behavior (actions & doing), cognition (thoughts & beliefs), attitude (preferences & values), and affect (emotions & feelings)
• what is OCB? (organizational citizenship behavior)

  helping others at work and positively contributing to the organization
• what is counterproductive behavior?

  harming others at work and hindering organizational goal accomplishment
• personality


  the sum total of ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts with others
• what can personality predict?

  deviance, work turnover, work performance, and company performance
• what are the three approaches in the major debate in OB to looking at personality?

  the dispositional approach, the situational approach, and the interactionist approach
• the dispositional approach focuses on individual dispositions and personality and says that individuals possess stable traits and characteristics that influence their attitudes and behaviors
• the situational approach focuses on the characteristics of the environmental/situational setting, saying that that is what influences people's feelings, attitudes, and behaviors
• the interactionist approach is a combination of the situational and the dispositional approach. it says that in order to predict & understand OB, we need to know something about an individual's personality and the work setting
• situations vary in the range of behavioral responses seen as appropriate, there are strong(courtroom, church, library) and weak(own room, with friends or family) situations
• putting the right person in the right job, group, or organization is very important
• what are the big five personalities?

  openness(to experience), conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism
• openness to experience is important for jobs that involve learning and creativity (such as chef and scientist) (bad for banker or accountant)
• conscientiousness is important for jobs that require someone careful, responsible, & organized and job performance on most jobs(project manager, surgeon)(bad for janitors) and the best predictor of job performance.
• extraversion is best for jobs that require interpersonal interaction and where being sociable, assertive, energetic, and ambitious is important for success(such as sales)(bad for accountants or librarians).
• agreeableness is good for jobs requiring interaction, cooperation, empathy, trustworthiness, and helping others(nurse, teacher)(bad for lawyer)
• neuroticism is bad for all jobs, but low neuroticism(or high emotional stability) causes people to have more effective interactions with coworkers and customers as they tend to be more calm and serene. (good for writers, musicians) (bad for air-traffic controllers, 911 operators, or ER workers)
• other personality concepts include locus of control(internal vs external), self-monitoring(the extent to which people observe and regulate how they behave and appear in social situations), self esteem(ones evaluation of themself), proactive personality, and general self-efficacy(someone's belief in their ability to perform successfully)
• perception: the process of interpreting messages of our senses to provide order and meaning to the environment
• factors that influence perception

  the perceiver(tend to select, ignore, and distort cues), the target, and the situation
• social identity theory


  our sense of self is composed of personal identity and social identity
• primary effect


  rely on cues presented early on (1st impression)
• recency effect


  rely on recent cues (last impression)
• people tend to rely on central traits: personal characteristics of a target person that are of particular interest to them
• implicit personality theories are personal theories people have about which personality traits "go together"
• projection: the tendency for perceivers to attribute their own thoughts and feelings to others
• stereotyping is seeing that some category of people have certain traits and perceiving that everyone in that group also possess them.
• in trying to determine whether behavior is internally(dispositional) or externally(situational) caused, we rely on:

  distinctiveness(whether an individual acts similarly across a variety of situations), consensus(whether everyone faced with a similar situation responds a certain way, and consistency(how often this occurs)
• fundamental attribution error causes us to blame people, not the situation first
• actor-observer affect says that actors and observers tend to view actors behaviors differently
• a self-serving bias is when people take credit for successful outcomes but not for failures
• why do people resort to stereotypes?

  it saves cognitive energy, and is reinforced by selective perception
• learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior prompted by feedback about consequences of behavior (behave-> get feedback -> change behavior)