Management

Leadership – the individual

Useful vocabulary

• behaviour• employee productivity• absenteeism• turnover• job satisfaction• attitudes• cognitive component• affective component

• job involvement• organisational

commitment• cognitive dissonance• attitude personality• Big Five Model• Machiavellianism

Today’s lecture

We will:•Identify the focus and goals of individual behaviour within organisations•Explain the role that attitudes play in job performance•Describe different personality theories•Describe perception and factors that influence it•Discuss learning theories and their relevance in shaping behaviour•Discuss contemporary issues in organisational behaviour

What is behaviour?

• Behaviour - the actions of people.

• Organisational behaviour - the study of the actions of people at work.

Organisation as an iceberg

Goals of organisational behaviour

• Improve employee productivity - a performance measure of both efficiency and effectiveness.

• Reduce absenteeism - the failure to show up for work.

• Reduce turnover - the voluntary and involuntary permanent withdrawal from an organisation.

Contributing factors to employee engagement

Attitudes

What are “attitudes”?

Attitudes are how we feel about something. These can be positive or negative.

Consider these issues and what your attitudes towards them are:•Football•Same-sex marriage•Having more than one child•Alcohol being banned

Exploring attitudes

Attitudes can be described as being made up of 3 components:

Components Description Example

Cognitive Description/evaluation My boss made me work late.

Affective Emotion/feeling I dislike my boss.

Behavioural Action I will not work hard.

Examples

Split these examples into the 3 components:

1.Suzy is unhappy that she cannot fit into her trousers and stops eating.

2.Barry does not understand Economics and does not attend class.

3.Jamie is worried about his mother and visits her.

Attitudes and behaviours

If you behave in a certain way will your attitude change?

•Behaviour Attitude = Yes or no?

Q. If you have to clean the campus toilets every day for a year, would you start to enjoy cleaning toilets?

Q. If everyone in your group went to a KTV bar every day, would you still enjoy the KTV bar?

Job Attitudes

Job Satisfaction•A positive feeling about the job

Job Involvement and commitment•Performance at work is linked to personal self-worth

Psychological Empowerment•Feeling of control over the job

Job involvement and organisational commitment

• Job involvement - 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 self-worth.

• organisational commitment - the degree to which an employee identifies with a particular organisation and its goals and wishes to maintain membership in that organisation.

Organisational support and commitment

Perceived organisational support - employees’ general belief that their organisation values their contribution and cares about their well-being.

Employee engagement

• Employee engagement - when employees are connected to, satisfied with, and enthusiastic about their jobs.

Factors that affect employee engagement

Cognitive dissonance - any incompatibility or inconsistency between attitudes, or, between behaviour and attitudes.

External factors such as:•Pay•Co-workers•The work undertaken

Internal factors such as:•Confidence•Self-worth•Self-belief

Surveys to discover attitudes

Attitude surveys - surveys that elicit responses from employees through questions about how they feel about their jobs, work groups, supervisors, or the organisation.

Example statements from an employee attitude survey

Job satisfaction outcomes

• Performance (eg, achieving targets)

• Organisational citizenship behaviour (eg, talking positively about company to others, helping others because they were helped)

• Customer satisfaction (eg, happy customers)

• Absenteeism (eg, how many days off work)

• Turnover (eg, changing staff)

• Workplace Deviance (eg, being late, stealing)

Job dissatisfaction

If someone is unhappy in their job, there are different ways they might react.

Personality

What is personality?

• Personality - the unique combination of emotional, thought, and behavioural patterns that affect how a person reacts to situations and interacts with others.

• Big Five Model - personality trait model that includes extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience.

The Big Five Model of Personality Dimensions

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

• Most widely used instrument in the world.• Participants are classified on four axes to determine

one of 16 possible personality types, such as ENTJ.

Flexible and Spontaneous

Sociable and Assertive

Quiet and Shy

UnconsciousProcesses

Uses Values & Emotions

Practical andOrderly

Use Reasonand Logic

Want Order& Structure

How Do the Big Five Traits Predict behaviour?

• Research has shown this to be a better framework.• Certain traits have been shown to strongly relate to higher job

performance:– Highly conscientious people develop more job knowledge,

exert greater effort, and have better performance.– Other Big Five Traits also have implications for work.

• Emotional stability is related to job satisfaction.• Extroverts tend to be happier in their jobs and have

good social skills.• Open people are more creative and can be good

leaders.• Agreeable people are good in social settings.

Holland’s personality job fit

Linking personality and values to the workplace

Managers are less interested in someone’s ability to do a specific job than in that person’s flexibility.

Person-Job Fit:– John Holland’s Personality-Job Fit Theory

• Six personality types• Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) is a test

– Key points of the model:• There appear to be intrinsic differences in personality

between people• There are different types of jobs• People in jobs matching their personality should be

more satisfied and have lower turnover

Personality traits

• Machiavellianism - a measure of the degree to which people are pragmatic, maintain emotional distance, and believe that ends justify means.

• Self-esteem - an individual’s degree of like or dislike for him/herself.

• Self-monitoring - a personality trait that measures the ability to adjust behaviour to external situational factors.

Other personality traits (1)

• Proactive personality - a trait belonging to people who identify opportunities, show initiative, take action, and persevere until meaningful change occurs.

• Resilience - an individual’s ability to overcome challenges and turn them into opportunities.

Other personality traits (2)

• Type A: moderate to high levels of stress and put selves under pressure. Quantity over quality.

• Type B: low to moderate levels of stress and take a more relaxed approach. Quality over quantity.

Global personalities

What do you think about personality types in different countries’ cultures?

•China?

•Middle East?

•UK?

•USA?

Emotions and emotional intelligence

Emotions - intense feelings that are directed at someone or something.

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is recent area of research. EI is a person’s ability to:•Be self-aware•Detect emotions in others•Manage emotional cues and information

There are many quizzes on the internet which try to measure your EI. Such as this one: http://www.queendom.com/queendom_tests/transfer

Application of EI

• Selection (eg, recruitment criteria)

• Decision making (eg, emotion v rationality)

• Creativity (eg, mood v creative thinking)

• Motivation (eg, positive = better motivation)

• Leadership (eg, communication)

• Negotiation (eg, positive = better negotiator)

• Customer service (eg, positive = better service)

China and the UK

Do we express any of these emotions differently?•Happy•Angry•Sad•Irritated•Impatient

What about other countries?

Perception

Perception

• Perception - a process by which we give meaning to our environment by organizing and interpreting sensory impressions.

• People’s behaviour is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself.

• The world as it is perceived is the world that is behaviourally important.

Blind Men and the Elephant

Perception exercise

How we perceive people

• Attribution Theory - how the actions of individuals are perceived by others depends on what meaning (causation) we attribute to a given behaviour.– Internally caused behaviour: under the

individual’s control– Externally caused behaviour: due to outside

factors

Attribution theory

How we perceive people

• Fundamental attribution error - the tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and to overestimate the influence of internal or personal factors. – We blame people first, not the situation

• Self-serving bias - the tendency of individuals

to attribute their successes to internal factors while blaming personal failures on external factors. – It is “our” success but “their” failure

Shortcuts used to judge others (1)

Stereotyping:

•Judging someone on the basis of one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs – a prevalent and often useful, if not always accurate, generalization

Shortcuts used to judge others (2)

Selective Perception•People selectively interpret what they see on the basis of their interests, background, experience, and attitudesHalo Effect•Drawing a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristicContrast Effects•Evaluation of a person’s characteristics that are affected by comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank higher or lower on the same characteristics

Shortcuts used in judging others

• Assumed similarity - the assumption that others are like oneself.

• Stereotyping - judging a person on the basis of one’s perception of a group to which he or she belongs.

• Halo effect - a general impression of an individual based on a single characteristic.

Learning

Psychological factors - learning

• Learning - any relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience.– Almost all complex behaviour is learned.– Learning is a continuous, life-long process.– The principles of learning can be used to shape

behaviour.

• Theories of learning:– Operant conditioning– Social learning

Operant conditioning

• Operant conditioning - a theory of learning that says behaviour is a function of its consequences– Operant behaviour: voluntary or learned

behaviours• behaviours are learned by making rewards

contingent to behaviours. • behaviour that is rewarded (positively reinforced) is

likely to be repeated.• behaviour that is punished or ignored is less likely

to be repeated.

Social learning

• Social learning theory - a theory of learning that says people can learn through observation and direct experience.– Attentional: the attractiveness or similarity of the

model– Retention: how well the model can be recalled– Motor reproduction: the reproducibility of the

model’s actions– Reinforcement: the rewards associated with

learning the model behaviour

Shaping – a managerial tool

• Shaping behaviour - the process of guiding learning in graduated steps using reinforcement or lack of reinforcement.

Shaping methods

Shaping methods:•Positive reinforcement: rewarding desired behaviours•Negative reinforcement: removing an unpleasant consequence once the desired behaviour is exhibited•Punishment: penalising an undesired behaviour •Extinction: eliminating a reinforcement for an undesired behaviour

Contemporary issues – Gen Y/Millenials

• Managing Generational Differences in the Workplace

• Gen Y/Millenials: individuals born after 1978– Bring new attitudes to the workplace that reflect

wide arrays of experiences and opportunities

– Want to work, but don’t want work to be their life

– Challenge the status quo

– Have grown up with technology

Gen Y/Millenials

Are you Gen Y/Millenial?

• Do you think you fit the Gen Y/Millenial stereotype?

• What do you want from your ideal job?

Summary

Today:•Job satisfaction and employee engagement•Perception•Personality•Attitudes•Learning

Tomorrow:Leading - motivation

Reading

• Please bring your Belbin Team Roles test results to the tutorial. Please print off the Myers-Briggs test.

• Please read Chapter 16 before tomorrow’s lecture.