Organizational Behaviour: Chapter 3 Review

Self-concept: An individual’s self-beliefs and self-evaluation, who am I? and how do I feel about
myself?

Complexity: refers to the number of distinct and important roles or identities that people
receive about themselves.

Self-expansion: People motivate and increase their complexity as they seek out new
opportunities and social connections.

Consistency: The degree in which a person’s identities requires similar personal attributes.

Clarity: The degree in which a person’s self-concept is clear, confidently defined, and stable.

Self-enhancement: A person’s inherent motivation to have a positive self-concept (ad to have

others perceive them favourably), such as being competent, attractive, lucky, ethical, and
important.

Self-verification: A person’s inherent motivation to confirm and maintain their existing self-
concept.

Self-evaluation:

Self-Esteem: The extent to which people like, respect, and are satisfied with themselves-
represents a comprehensive self-evaluation.

Self-efficacy: A person’s belief that they have the ability, motivation correct role perceptions,
and favourable situation to complete a task successfully.

Locus of control: A person’s general belief about the amount of control they have over personal
life events.

Social identity theory: A theory stating people define themselves by the groups to which they
belong or have an emotional attachment.

Perception: The process of receiving information about making sense of our surrounding
environment.

Selective attention: The process of attending to some information received by our senses and
ignoring other information.

Confirmation bias: The process of screening out information that is contrary to our values and
assumptions, and to more readily accept confirming information.
Categorical thinking: Organizing people and objects into preconceived categories that are stored
in our long-term memory.

Mental models: Knowledge structure that we develop to describe, explain, and predict the
world around us. Images in our mind as to what it would look like.

Stereotyping: The process of assigning traits to people based on their membership in a social
category.

Categorization: Social identity is a comparative process, and the comparison begins by

categorizing people into distinct groups.

Homogenization: To simplify the comparison process, we tend to think that people within each
group are very similar to one another.

Differentiation: Along with categorizing and homogenizing people, we tend to assign more
favourable characteristics to people in our society identity groups than to people in other
groups.

Stereotype threat: An individual’s concern about confirming a negative stereotype about their
group.

Attribution process: The perceptual process of deciding whether an observed behaviour or

event is caused largely by internal or external factors.

Self-serving bias: The tendency to attribute our favourable outcomes to internal factors and our
failures to external factors.

Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to see the person rather than the situation as the
main cause of that person’s behaviour.

Self-fulfilling prophecy: The perceptual process in which our expectations about another person
cause that person to act more consistently with those expectations.

Positive organizational behaviour: A perspective of organizational behaviour that focuses on

building positive qualities and traits within individuals or institutions as opposed to focusing on
what is wrong with them.

Halo effect: A perceptual error whereby our general impression of a person, usually based on
one prominent characteristic, colours our perception of other characteristics of that person.

False-consensus effect: A perceptual error in which we overestimate the extent to which others
have beliefs and characteristics similar to our own.
Recency effect: a perceptual error in which the most recent information dominates our
perception of others.

Primacy effect: A perceptual error in which we quickly form an opinion of people based on the
first information we receive about them.

Johari Window: A model of self-awareness and mutual understanding with others that
advocates disclosure and feedback to increase our open area and reduce the blind, hidden, and
unknown areas.

The open area: includes information about you that is known both to you and to others.

The blind area: refers to information that is known to others but not to you.

The hidden area: Information known to you and not to others.

The unknown area: includes your values, beliefs, talents, and behaviours that aren’t known to
you or others.

Contact hypothesis: A theory stating that the more we interact with someone, the less
prejudiced or perceptually biased we will be against that person.

Empathy: A person’s understanding of and sensitivity to the feelings, thoughts, and situations of
others.

Global Mindset: refers to an individual’s ability to perceive, know about, and process
information across cultures. It includes the following four specific elements.

Adopting a global perspective: A global mindset increases as the individual acquires more of a
global than a local/parochial frame of reference about their business and its environment.

Empathizing and acting effectively across cultures: A global mindset includes understanding the
perceptions and emotions of co-workers from other cultures in various situations.

Processing complex information about novel environments: People who work across cultures
are frequently placed in new situations that require quick understanding and decision making.

Developing new multilevel mental models: A global mindset involves the capacity to quickly
develop useful mental models of situations, particularly at both a local and global level of
analysis.