Attitudes are evaluative statements—either
favorable or unfavorable—about objects,
DIVERSITY
the practice or quality of including or
involving people from a range of different social
and ethnic backgrounds and of different
genders, sexual orientations, etc.
Workplace Diversity
Can refer to any characteristics that make
people different from one another.
Levels of Diversity
 Surface-Level Diversity- differences among
group members in overt, biological
characteristics that are typically reflected in
physical features.
 Deep-Level Diversity- differences among group
members attitudes, beliefs, values.
Diversity in the Workplace
 Thinking styles, Language, Ethnicity, Religion,
Perspectives, Experiences, Nationality, Job level,
Race, Culture, Skills, Gender, Physical Abilities,
Sexual Orientation, Age
Multiple Generations at Work
 TRADITIONALISTS
Experience: great depression
Work is: an obligation
Aspiration: home ownership
Changing job: stay for life
Career path: slow and steady
 BOOMERS
Experience: television, moon landing,
watergate, Vietnam war
Work is: expected
Aspiration: job security
Changing job: loyal to employer; connecting to
values
Career path: upward mobility
 GENX
Experience: MTV, Nintendo, PC’S
Work is: A difficult challenge
Aspiration: work-life balance, independence
Changing job: if necessary for compensation
Career path: need to know options now
 MILLENIAL
Experience: natural disaster, diversity, mobile
technology
Work is: a means to an end
Aspiration: freedom and flexibility
Changing job: is expected
Career path: switch frequently and fast
 GEN2020
Experience: economic downturn, global
warming
Work is: consistently evolving
Aspiration: structure and stability
Changing job: constantly
Career path: career “multitaskers”
people, or events. They reflect how we feel
about something.
- defined as “a psychological
tendency that is expressed by
evaluating a particular entity with
some degree of favor or disfavor.
Three components:
 Cognitive – our thoughts, beliefs, and ideas
about something.
For example: The statement “My pay is low”
 Affect – feelings or emotions that something
evokes.
For example: “I am angry over how little I’m
paid.”
 Behavior – tendency or disposition to act in
certain ways towards something.
For example: “I’m going to look for another job
that pays better.”
Leon Festinger—argued that attitudes follow behavior.
Festinger proposed that cases of attitude
following behavior illustrate the effects of cognitive
dissonance, any incompatibility an individual might
perceive between two or more attitudes or between
behavior and attitudes.
Festinger argued that any form of inconsistency
is uncomfortable and that individuals will therefore
attempt to reduce it. They will seek a stable state, which
is a minimum of dissonance.
Festinger proposed that the desire to reduce
dissonance depends on three factors:
 importance of the elements creating
it
 degree of influence we believe we
have over them. Individuals will be
more motivated to reduce dissonance
when the attitude is important or
when they believe the dissonance is
due to something they can control.
 rewards of dissonance, high rewards
accompanying high dissonance tend
to reduce the tension inherent in the
dissonance (dissonance is less
distressing if accompanied with
something good, such as higher pay
than deserved).
Moderating Variables
- Importance of the attitude
- Correspondence to behavior,
- its accessibility,
- The presence of social pressures,
- and whether a person has direct experience
with the attitude.
Major Job Attitudes
 Job Satisfaction, which describes a positive
feeling about a job, resulting from an evaluation
of its characteristics. A person with a high level
of job satisfaction holds positive feelings about
his or her job, whereas a person with a low level
holds negative feelings.
  Job Involvement, which measures the degree
to which people identify psychologically with
their jobs and consider their perceived
performance levels important to self-worth
- related concept is Psychological
Empowerment, employees’ beliefs in the
degree to which they influence their work
environments, their competencies, the
meaningfulness of their jobs, and their
perceived autonomy.
 Organizational Commitment, an employee
identifies with a particular organization and its
goals and wishes to remain a member. Most
research has focused on emotional attachment
to an organization and belief in its values as the
“gold standard” for employee commitment.
Perceived organizational support (POS) is the degree to
which employees believe the organization values their
contributions and cares about their well-being.
Employee Engagement, an individual’s involvement
with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for, the work
she does.
- Harnessing of organization member’s selves
to their work roles; in engagement, people
employ and express themselves physically,
cognitively, and emotionally during role
performance.
The Impact of Satisfied and Dissatisfied Employees
on the Workplace
• Exit. The exit response directs behavior toward
leaving the organization, including looking for a new
position as well as resigning.
• Voice. The voice response includes actively and
constructively attempting to improve conditions,
including suggesting improvements, discussing
problems with superiors, and undertaking some forms
of union activity.
• Loyalty. The loyalty response means passively but
optimistically waiting for conditions to improve,
including speaking up for the organization in the face of
external criticism and trusting the organization and its
management to “do the right thing.”
• Neglect. The neglect response passively allows
conditions to worsen and includes
chronic absenteeism or lateness, reduced effort, and
increased error rate.
Emotions and Moods
Affect is a generic term that covers a broad range of
feelings people experience, including both emotions
and moods.
Emotions are intense feelings directed at someone or
something.
Moods are less intense feelings than emotions and
often (though not always) arise without a specific event
acting as a stimulus.
The Basic Emotions
emotions—anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and
surprise.
Positive emotions—such as joy, gratitude, excitement
and cheerfulness—express a favorable evaluation or
feeling.
Negative emotions—such as anger, guilt, nervousness,
stress, and anxiety—express the opposite.
Sources of Emotions and Moods
 Personality- Moods and emotions have a trait
component: most people have built-in
tendencies to experience certain moods and
emotions more frequently than others do.
 Day of the Week and Time of the Day- people
tend to be in their worst moods early in the
week, and in their best moods late in
the week.
 Weather- believe mood is tied to the weather.
 Stress- Mounting levels of stress can worsen
our moods, and we experience more negative
emotions.
 Social Activities
 Sleep
 Exercise
 Age
 Sex
Emotional Labor- an employee’s expression of
organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal
transactions at work.
Emotional Dissonance- and it can take a heavy toll.
Emotional dissonance is like cognitive dissonance as
discussed in a previous chapter, except that emotional
dissonance concerns feelings rather than thinking.
Felt Emotions are an individual’s actual emotions.
Displayed Emotions are those that the organization
requires workers to show and considers appropriate in
a given job.
Surface acting is hiding inner feelings and forgoing
emotional expressions in response to display rules.
Deep acting is trying to modify our true inner feelings
based on display rules.
Emotional intelligence (EI) is a person’s ability to (1)
perceive emotions in the self and others, (2) understand
the meaning of these emotions, and (3) regulate one’s
emotions accordingly in a cascading model
Emotion Regulation—identifying and modifying the
emotions you feel.
Understanding of emotions and moods can improve our
ability to explain and predict the selection process in
organizations, decision making,
Creativity, motivation, leadership, interpersonal
conflict, negotiation, customer service,
Job attitudes, and deviant workplace behaviors.
PERSONALITY
Gordon Allport said personality is “the dynamic
organization within the individual of those
psychophysical systems that determine his unique
adjustments to his environment.”
Personality as the sum total of ways in which an
individual reacts to and interacts with others.
Personality the relatively enduring pattern
of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize
a person, along with the psychological processes behind
those characteristics
Personality Determinants
- Nature refers to our genetic or hereditary
origins—the genes that we inherit from our
parents.
- Nurture—our socialization, life experiences,
and other forms of interaction with the
environment.
Ability the natural aptitudes and learned capabilities
required to successfully complete a task
Aptitudes are the natural talents
Role Perceptions the degree to which a person
understands the job duties assigned to or expected of
him or her
The four elements of the MARS model—motivation,
ability, role perceptions, and situational factors—affect
all voluntary workplace behaviors and performance.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is the most
widely used personality- assessment instrument in the
world. It is a 100-question personality test that asks
people how they usually feel or act in particular
situations. Respondents are classified as extraverted or
introverted (E or I), sensing or intuitive (S or N),
thinking or feeling (T or F), and judging or perceiving (J
or P).
 Extraverted (E) Versus Introverted (I).
Extraverted individuals are outgoing, sociable,
and assertive. Introverts are quiet and shy.
 Sensing (S) Versus Intuitive (N). Sensing types
are practical and prefer routine and order. They
focus on details. Intuitives rely on unconscious
processes and look at the “big picture.”
 Thinking (T) Versus Feeling (F). Thinking types
use reason and logic to handle problems.
Feeling types rely on their personal values and
emotions.
 Judging (J) Versus Perceiving (P). Judging types
want control and prefer their world to be
ordered and structured. Perceiving types are
flexible and spontaneous.
Big Five Model—that five basic dimensions underlie all
others and encompass most of the significant variation
in human personality.
 Extraversion a personality dimension describing
people who are outgoing, talkative, sociable,
and assertive
 Openness to experience a personality
dimension describing people who are
imaginative, creative, unconventional, curious,
nonconforming, autonomous, and aesthetically
perceptive
 Neuroticism a personality dimension describing
people who tend to be anxious, insecure, self-
conscious, depressed, and temperamental
 Agreeableness a personality dimension
describing people who are trusting, helpful,
good-natured, considerate, tolerant, selfless,
generous, and flexible
 Conscientiousness a personality dimension
describing people who are organized,
dependable, goal-focused, thorough,
disciplined, methodical, and industrious
Other Personality Traits Relevant to OB
 Core Self-Evaluations (CSE) People who have
positive core self-evaluations like themselves
and see themselves as effective, capable, and in
control of their environment.
 Machiavellianism (often abbreviated Mach) is
named after Niccolo Machiavelli, an individual
high in Machiavellianism is pragmatic, maintains
emotional distance, and believes ends can
justify means.
 Narcissism describes a person who has a
grandiose sense of self-importance, requires
excessive admiration, has a sense of
entitlement, and is arrogant.
 Self-monitoring refers to an individual’s ability
to adjust behavior to external, situational
factors.
 Risk Taking- People differ in their willingness to
take chances, a quality that affects how much
time and information they need to make a
decision.
 Proactive Personality identify opportunities,
show initiative, take action, and persevere until
meaningful change occurs, compared to others
who passively react to situations.
VALUES represent basic convictions that “a
specific mode of conduct or end-state of
existence is personally or socially preferable to
an opposite or converse mode of conduct or
end-state of existence.”
- stable, evaluative beliefs that guide our
preferences for outcomes or courses of
action in a variety of situations.
When we rank an individual’s values in terms of
their intensity, we obtain that person’s VALUE
SYSTEM.
Personal Values exist only within individuals
Shared Values groups of people might hold the
same or similar values
Organizational Values shared by people
throughout an organization
Cultural Values shared across a society
ROKEACH VALUE Survey Milton Rokeach
created the Rokeach Value Survey
(RVS). It consists of two sets of values, each
containing 18 individual value items.
 Terminal Values, refers to desirable end-
states. These are the goals a person would
like to achieve during a lifetime.
  Instrumental Values, refers to preferable
modes of behavior, or means of achieving
the terminal values.
Personality–Job Fit Theory the effort to match
job requirements with personality
characteristics is best articulated
in John Holland.
- Realistic: Prefers physical activities that
require skill, strength, and coordination
- Investigative: Prefers activities that
involve thinking, organizing, and understanding
- Social: Prefers activities that involve helping
and developing others
- Conventional: Prefers rule-regulated,
orderly, and unambiguous activities
- Enterprising: Prefers verbal activities in
which there are opportunities to influence
others and attain power
- Artistic: Prefers ambiguous and
unsystematic activities that allow creative
expression
International Values
One of the most widely referenced approaches for
analyzing variations among cultures by Geert Hofstede.
• Power Distance. Power distance describes the degree
to which people in a country accept that power in
institutions and organizations is distributed unequally.
• Individualism Versus Collectivism. Individualism is
the degree to which people prefer to act as individuals
rather than as members of groups and believe in
individual rights above all else. Collectivism emphasizes
a tight social framework in which people expect others
in groups of which they are a part to look after them
and protect them.
• Masculinity Versus Femininity. Masculinity is the
degree to which the culture favors traditional masculine
roles such as achievement, power, and control, as
opposed to viewing men and women as equals. A high
femininity rating means the culture sees little
differentiation between male and female roles and
treats women as the equals of men in all respects.
• Uncertainty Avoidance. The degree to which people
in a country prefer structured
over unstructured situations define their uncertainty
avoidance.
• Long-Term Versus Short-Term Orientation. This
newest addition to Hofstede’s typology measures a
society’s devotion to traditional values. long-term
orientation look to the future and value thrift,
persistence, and
tradition. In a short-term orientation, people value the
here and now
TYPES OF VALUES
by social psychologist Shalom Schwartz
 Openness To Change, refers to the extent
to which a person is motivated to pursue
innovative ways. This quadrant includes the
value categories of self-direction (creativity,
independent thought), stimulation
(excitement and challenge), and hedonism
(pursuits of pleasure, enjoyment, gratification of
desires).
 Conservation, which is the extent to which
a person is motivated to preserve the status
quo. The conservation quadrant includes
the value categories of conformity
(adherence to social norms and
expectations), security (safety and stability),
and tradition (moderation and preservation
of the status quo).
 Self-Enhancement, refers to how much a
person is motivated by self-interest. This
quadrant includes the values categories of
achievement (pursuit of personal success),
power (dominance over others), and
hedonism (a values category shared with
openness to change).
 Self-Transcendence, which refers to
motivation to promote the welfare of
others and nature. Self-transcendence
includes the value categories of
benevolence (concern for others in one’s
life) and universalism (concern for the
welfare of all people and nature).
THREE ETHICAL PRINCIPLES
• Utilitarianism. This principle says the only moral
obligation is to seek the greatest good for the greatest
number of people.
• Individual Rights. This principle says that everyone
has the same set of natural rights, such as freedom of
movement, physical security, freedom of speech, and
fair trial.
• Distributive justice. This principle says that the
benefits and burdens of similar individuals should be
the same, otherwise they should be proportional.
Moral Intensity the degree to which an issue
demands the application of ethical principles
Moral Sensitivity a person’s ability to recognize
the presence of an ethical issue and determine its
relative importance
PERCEPTION is the process through which
people organize and interpret their sensory
information (what they hear and see) to give
meaning to their world.
Factors That Influence Perception
• Perceiver. When you look at a target and attempt to
interpret what you see, your interpretation is heavily
influenced by your personal characteristics—your
attitudes, personality, motives, interests, past
experiences, and expectations.
• Target. Characteristics of the target also affect what
we perceive. Loud people are more likely to be noticed
in a group than quiet ones.
• Situation. Context matters too. The time at which we
see an object or event can influence our attention, as
can location, light, heat, or any number of situational
factors.
Attribution theory tries to explain the ways in which we
judge people differently, depending on the meaning we
attribute to a given behavior.

It suggests that when we observe an individual’s
behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was
internally or externally caused.
The Three Determining Factors
1. Distinctiveness. Distinctiveness refers to
whether or not an individual display different
behaviors in different situations.
2. Consensus. If everyone who faces a similar
situation responds in the same way, we can say
the behavior shows consensus.
3. Consistency. an observer looks for consistency
in a person’s actions.
Perceptual Biases
 The Primacy Effect They seek only consistent
information and rule out alternatives that
conflict with their initial impression.
The authors concluded increased
exposure time only seems to bolster a person’s
initial first impressions.
 The Recency Effect Not only do people
remember what they experience first, they also
remember the most recently presented items
or experiences.
 The Availability Bias Sometimes, a person’s
judgments are based upon what most readily
comes into a person’s mind.
 Contrast Effects , a leader’s performance
evaluation of a person is affected by
comparisons with other people recently
encountered who rank higher or lower on the
same characteristics.
 Halo Error occurs when the rater’s overall
positive (or negative in the case of horns)
impression or evaluation strongly influence
ratings of specific attributes.
Decision Processes and Organizational Performance
Decision making is central in Mintzberg’s classic
analysis of the nature of managerial work
Four Decisional Roles
- Entrepreneur (looking for new ideas and
opportunities)
- Disturbance Handler (resolving conflicts
and choosing strategic alternatives)
- Resource Allocator (deciding how to
prioritize the direction of resources),
- negotiator (protecting the interests of the
business by interacting within teams,
departments, and the organization).
Constraints on Individual Decision Making
- lack of information, unclear or conflicting
goals, and the uncertainty of outcomes.
Rational Decision Making, model of decision making
presents a series of logical steps decision makers follow
to determine the optimal choice. These
decisions follow a six-step rational decision-making
model.
1. Problem or Opportunity Identification
2. Information Search and Analysis
3. Generate Alternatives
4. Evaluate alternatives.
5. Make Decision.
6. Develop Action Plans.
The rational decision-making model relies on a number
of assumptions, including that the decision maker has
complete information, is able to identify all the relevant
options in an unbiased manner, and chooses the option
with the highest utility.
Bounded Rationality- Human beings have a limited
capacity to process large amounts of information in the
context of decision making to make optimal decisions.
- also the result of two guesses the decision
maker must address: (1) a guess about
uncertain future consequences and (2) a
guess about uncertain future preferences.
Intuitive Decision Making, an unconscious process
created from distilled experience.26 It occurs outside
conscious thought; it relies on holistic associations, or
links between disparate pieces of information; it’s fast;
and it’s affectively charged, meaning it usually engages
the emotions.
“Intuition is a highly complex and highly developed
form of reasoning that is based on years of experience
and learning.”
Decision Traps
Hindsight bias, also commonly referred to as the I-
knew-it-all-along effect.
- defined as “the tendency for individuals
with outcome knowledge (hindsight) to
claim they would have estimated a
probability of occurrence for the reported
outcome that is higher than they would
have estimated in foresight (without the
outcome information).”
Overconfidence, Those higher in the organizational
hierarchy feel more empowered and overestimate their
ability to accurately forecast the future.
Escalation of commitment occurs when individuals
continue a failing course of action after receiving
feedback that shows it isn’t working.
Three Ethical Decision Criteria
- Utilitarianism, which proposes making
decisions solely on the basis of their
outcomes, ideally to provide the greatest
good for the greatest number.
- An emphasis on rights in decision making
means respecting and protecting the basic
rights of individuals, such as the right to
privacy, free speech, and due process. This
criterion protects whistle-blowers when
they reveal an organization’s unethical
practices to the press or government
agencies, using their right to free speech.
- A third criterion is to impose and enforce
rules fairly and impartially to ensure justice
or an equitable distribution of benefits and
costs. Union members typically favor this
view.
Three-Component Model of Creativity
Expertise is the foundation for all creative work.
- The potential for creativity is enhanced
when individuals have abilities, knowledge,
proficiencies, and similar expertise in their
field of endeavor.
Creative-Thinking Skills. This encompasses personality
characteristics associated with creativity, the ability to
use analogies, and the talent to see
the familiar in a different light.
Intrinsic Task Motivation. This is the desire to work on
something because it’s interesting, involving, exciting,
satisfying, or personally challenging. It’s what turns
creativity potential into actual creative ideas.