COM 321: Leading Peoples and Organizations

Why do we learn Organizational Behaviour?

Inner Work Life Debrief:

12000 diary entries from 238 professionals from 26 project teams

Their findings:
-when something happens at work, that immediately triggers cognitive, emotional, and
motivational process
-most managers are not in tune with the inner work life of their people

Three elements in one’s inner work life:

1)PERCEPTION (about yourself, others, and the organization)-what you think
2)EMOTIONS based on those perceptions-what you feel
3)MOTIVATIONS-you are stimulated and have reason to do something

OB
OB studies people’s inner work lives
Define: a study of what people do in organization and how their behaviour affects the
organization’s performance.
Studies behaviours manifested in individuals, relationships, and groups in organizations.
People aspects in what’s going on in organizations
Involves psychology. Social psychology, sociology, and many others.

Human behaviour does not have only one answer; people make sense of their social situations
in many ways
There is no one best way to solve a problem
Different from natural science, economic perspective
Be comfortable with “it depends”

With OB, we can:

Manage others- framework to use to be a good leader, dealing with human interactions and
behaviours
Manage yourself-prepares you to understand your inner work life better and be more
successful. Understand what motivates you at work, have compassion and can empathize
Do the right thing- helps you look at people not as tools, but individuals with thoughts, feelings,
and motivations
Mother parker: LO1
Motivation, ability, role clarity, situational support

LO5
Utilitarianism
Individual rights
Distributive justice

Big 5 personality factors

Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Openness
Conscientiousness

Class 3: Personality

What is personality?
Stable pattern of behaviour and consistent internal states of a person (vs mood)
Able to predict the ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts with others
Easier/simpler way to describe someone in a reliable fashion

Why does personality matter in OB?

Organizations want people who can perform well. Personality can predict a future employee
Good team player?
Fit with organization?
Fit with job?
Companies use personality tests as a part of recruiting
Research, articles, and reports on personality and job performance
There are many types of personality traits

Five factor of personality

-conscientiousness
-agreeableness
-neuroticism
-openness
-extraversion

Conscientiousness
Measures someone’s reliability-responsible, organized, attention to detail, dependable, persistent
On opposite side of organized which is disorganized- easily distracted, unreliable
Research findings
Conscientiousness
-higher levels of job knowledge, higher performance
-enhanced leadership
-high conscientiousness can be detrimental to work performance
-may have trouble learning complex skills early at the stage
Disorganized
-more creative, artistic
-easily adapt to change
-less afraid to take risks

Agreeableness
-cooperative, warm, trusting, altruistic
-more complaint and rule abiding
-people like them
Disagreeable
-cold, aloof, antagonistic

Research findings
Agreeable
-higher performance
-lower levels of deviant behaviour
-not necessarily happier than disagreeable people
-less relevant to career success (can’t promote self-interest)
Disagreeable
-help other group members have balanced views: devil’s advocate

Neuroticism
Characteristics and research findings
-emotionally stable
-calm, self-confident, secure,
-positive and optimistic, experience fewer negative emotions
-higher job and life satisfaction-R
-lower stress levels
Neurotic
-nervous, high strung, anxious, depressed, insecure
-hypervigilant (looks for problems)
-vulnerable to the physical and psychological effect of stress
-greater self-awareness-R

Openness to Experience
Interests and fascination with novelty
Openness
-creative, curious, artistically sensitive
-receptive to new idea
-more comfortable with ambiguity
Close minded
-conventional, find comfort in the familiar
-favor the status quo

Research findings
Openness
-shows high training performance
Enhanced leadership
-better adapt to organizational change

Extraversion
Comfort level with interpersonal relationships
Extravert
-gregarious, assertive, sociable
-socially dominant
-excited and energized by busy environment
Introvert
-withdrawn, shy, reserved
-tend to be overwhelmed with high level of stimulation in the environment

Research findings
Extravert
-perform better in jobs requiring significant interpersonal interactions
-enhanced leadership
-higher job and life satisfaction

Revisiting Introversion
Benefits of introverts
-power of quiet boss, gentle
-the introverted leaders listened carefully and made employees feel valued, motivating them to
work hard
-proactive followers are better under an introverted leader, proactive leaders with extraverted
boss can be a disaster.

Research findings
Introvert
-perform better in jobs with more independent time requiring interaction with smaller groups of
people
-enhanced leadership when working with proactive team members

Values in the Workplace

Stable, evaluative beliefs that guide our preferences.
-define right/wrong, good/bad- what we “ought” to do.
-direct our motivation, potential decisions/behaviour.
Values system- a person’s hierarchy of values
Compared with personality, values are:
-evaluative
-may conflict strongly with each other
-affected more by nurture than nature

The Hofstede culture values

Individualism
Power distance
Uncertainty avoidance
Achievement- nurturing

Ch 4 Reading notes
Employees often need to display emotions that are quite different from the emotions they are
experiencing at that moment. This incongruity produces an emotional tension called emotional
dissonance.

Job satisfaction, a person's evaluation of his or her job and work context.

A useful template for organizing and understanding the consequences of job dissatisfaction is the
exit-voice-loyalty-neglect (E VLN) mod el. As the name suggests, the EVLN model identifies
four ways that employees respond to dissatisfaction

Maintain strong customer service by applying the service profit chain model. This model, which
is diagrammed in Exhibit 4.5, proposes that job satisfaction has a positive effect on customer
service, which flows on to shareholder financial returns. The process begins with workplace
practices that increase or decrease job satisfaction. Job satisfaction then influences whether
employees stay (employee retention) as well as their motivation and behaviour on the job.
Retention, motivation, and behaviour affect service quality, which influences the customer's
satisfaction, perceived value of the service, and tendency to recommend the service to others
(referrals).

The stress experience, called general adaptation syndrome, involves moving through three
stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.

. Four of the most common workplace stressors are organizational constraints, interpersonal
conflict, work overload, and low task control.

Many interventions are available to manage work-related stress, including removing the stressor,
withdrawing from the stressor, changing stress perceptions, controlling stress consequences, and
receiving social support.
Employee Engagement
-an employee’s emotional and cognitive motivation, specifically a focused, persistent, intense,
and purposeful toward work related goals. It involves emotional involvement, commitment, and
satisfaction through work. High level of absorption and self-efficacy. It is the most important
human resources issue. Drivers = goal setting, involvement, organizational justice and
comprehension, development opportunities, company vision.

Expectancy Theory- work effort is directed toward behaviours that people believe will produce
the most favorable outcomes.

2 forms of organizational justice:

Distributive justice- fairness in outcomes we receive
Procedural- fairness of procedures used to decide distribution of resources

Equity theory says that employees determine feelings of equity by comparing their own
outcome/input ratio to the outcome/input ratio of some other person

Perceiving Ourselves and Others

Why study perceptions in OB?

Self-concept and perceptions about others influence almost all OB topics
Impact people’s well-being at work

Self-concept
Refers to people’s beliefs and evaluations about themselves
Who am I? how do I feel about myself?
Two opposing human motivations:
1. Motivation to be distinctive and different from other people (personal identity)
2. Motivation for inclusion and assimilation with other people (the need for affiliation;
social identity)
Four processes shaping self-concept and motivate a person’s decision and behaviour: self-
evaluation, enhancement, verification, social self (roles in teams, orgs, social groups.

Processes of Self-Concept
1. Self enhancement- dive to promote and protect a positive self-view.
2. Self-verification- motivation to confirm and maintain our self-concepts
3. Self-evaluation
-self-esteem: extent to which people lie, respect, and are satisfied with themselves.
-self-efficacy: belief that one can successfully perform a task
-locus of control: general belief about personal control over life events
Higher self-evaluation with internal locus of control

4. Social Self- social identity theory: a complex combination of many memberships, and
certain social identity become salient depending on situations/context
 We tend to define ourselves by groups we are:
-easily identified with
-have high status
- minority status in a situation

What is Perception?
The process of receiving information and making sense of the world around us
The underlying mechanism: our brain 1) prefers easy and simple things and 2) workd in a
way that favors our self-concepts

Perception process:
Environmental stimuli
Selective attention- process of attending to some information received by our senses and
ignoring other information
Affected by characteristics of perceiver and object perceived
Prone to biases
Perceptual Grouping- simplifying our understanding of world by reducing information
volume and complexity

Stereotyping
Assigning traits to people based on their membership in social categories
Why people stereotype:
-categorial thinking
-fulfills drive to understand and predict others’ behaviour
-fulfills a perceivers own need for self-enhancement and social identity

Other Perceptual Effects

Halo effect: general impression of person from one trait affects perception of person’s other
traits
False-consensus effect: overestimate extent that others share our beliefs or traits
Recency effect: most recent information dominates our perceptions
Primary effect: quickly form opinion of others based on first information received about
them

Improving Perceptions
Awareness of perceptual biases
-problems: reinforces stereotypes, limited effect on prejudice
Improving self-awareness
-look for implicit assumptions/biases
-problems: difficult to avoid implicit bias activation, more sensitized and self-conscious with
target groups
Meaningful Interaction
-people work together on valued activities
-based on contact hypothesis
-interaction reduces perceptual bias of others
-improves empathy
-understanding and being sensitive to the feelings, thoughts, and situations of others