I.

Focus and Goals of Organizational Behavior:

- Behavior is the actions of people and organizational behavior is the study of the actions of people
at work.
- One of the challenges in understanding organizational behavior is that it addresses issues that
aren’t obvious. Like an iceberg, OB has a small visible dimension and a much large hidden
portion.
- What we see when we look at an organization is its visible aspects: strategies, goals, policies and
procedures, structure, technology, formal authority relationships, and chain of command.
- But under the surface are other elements that managers need to understand - elements that also
influence how employees behave at work.

1. Focus of Organizational Behavior:

- OB includes such topics as attitudes, personality, perception, learning, and motivation.
- OB is concerned with group behavior, which includes norms, roles, team building, leadership, and conflict.
- OB also looks at organizational aspects including structure, culture, and human resources policies and practices.

2. Goals of Organizational Behavior:

- The goals of OB are to explain, predict, and influence behavior. Managers need to be able to explain why employees
engage in some behaviors rather than others, predict how employees will respond to various actions and decisions, and
influence how employees behave.
- Some employee behaviors we are specifically concerned with explaining, predicting, and influencing:
+ Employee productivity: a performance measure of both efficiency and effectiveness.
+ Absenteeism: the failure to show up for work. Although absenteeism can’t be totally eliminated, excessive levels
have a direct and immediate impact on the organization’s functioning.
+ Turnover is the voluntary and involuntary permanent withdrawal from an organization. It can be a problem
because of increased recruiting, selection, and training costs and work disruptions.
+ Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is discretionary behavior that’s not part of an employee’s formal job
requirements but promotes the effective functioning of the organization. Organizations need individuals who will
do more than their usual job duties, but drawbacks of OCB occurs when employees experience work overload,
stress, and work-family life conflicts.
 + Job satisfaction refers to an employee’s general attitude toward his or her job. Although it is an attitude rather than a
behavior, it’s an outcome that concerns many managers because satisfied employees are more likely to show up for
work, have higher levels of performance, and stay with an organization.
+ Counterproductive workplace behavior is any intentional employee behavior that is potentially harmful to the
organization or individuals within the organization. It shows up in 4 ways: deviance, aggression, antisocial
behavior, and violence.
- Four psychological factors: employee attitudes, personality, perception, and learning - can help predict and explain
employee behaviors.

II. Attitude and Job Performance:

- Attitudes are evaluative statements - favorable or unfavorable - concerning objects, people, or events, They reflect how an
individual feels about something.
- An attitude is made up of 3 components: cognition, affect, and behavior:
+ The cognitive component of an attitude refers to the beliefs, opinions, or information held by a person.
+ The affective component of an attitude is the emotional or feeling part of an attitude.
+ The behavioral component of an attitude refers to an intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something.
- The three most attitudes widely known are job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment. Another concept
that’s generating widespread interest is employee engagement.

1. Job Satisfaction:
● Job satisfaction refers to a person’s general attitude toward his or her job.
a) How Satisfied Are Employees?:
- Even though it’s possible that higher pay translates into higher job satisfaction, an alternative explanation for the
difference in satisfaction levels is that higher pay reflects different types of jobs.
- Higher-paying jobs generally require more advanced skills, give jobholders greater responsibilities, are more
stimulating and provide more challenges, and allow workers more control.
b) Satisfaction and Productivity:
- The correlation between satisfaction and productivity is fairly strong.
- Also, organizations with more satisfied employees tend to be more effective than organizations with fewer satisfied
employees.
c) Satisfaction and Absenteeism:
- Although research shows that satisfied employees have lower levels of absenteeism than dissatisfied employees, the
correlation isn’t strong.
- For instance, organizations that provide liberal sick leave benefits are encouraging all their employees - including
those who are highly satisfied - to take “sick” days.
d) Satisfaction and Turnover:
- Satisfied employees have lower levels of turnover, while dissatisfied employees have higher levels of turnover.
Turnover is affected by the level of employee performance.
- The level of satisfaction is less important in predicting turnover for superior performers because the organization
typically does everything it can to keep them - pay raises, increased promotion opportunities, and so forth.
- Managers can promote job satisfaction by identifying incentives that are valued by employees.
e) Job Satisfaction and Customer Satisfaction:
- Satisfied employees increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. In service organizations, customer retention and
defection are highly dependent on how frontline employees deal with customers. Satisfied customers are more
likely to be friendly, upbeat, and responsive, which customers appreciate.
- Because satisfied employees are less likely to leave their jobs, customers are more likely to encounter familiar faces
and receive experienced service.
- Dissatisfied customers can increase an employee’s job dissatisfaction. Employees who have regular contact with
customers report that rude, thoughtless, or unreasonably demanding customers adversely affect their job
satisfaction.
- Service-oriented businesses seek to hire upbeat and friendly employees, they train employees in customer service,
they reward customer service, they provide positive work climates, and they regularly track employee satisfaction
through attitude surveys.
f) Job Satisfaction and OCB:
- Satisfied employees would seem more likely to talk positively about the organization, help others, and go above or
beyond normal job expectations.
- Research suggests that a modest overall relationship between job satisfaction and OCB. But that relationship is
tempered by perceptions of fairness.
 - When you perceive that several things (your supervisor, organizational procedures, or pay policies) are fair, you
have more trust in your employer and are more willing to voluntarily engage in behaviors that go beyond your
formal job requirements.
- Another factor that influences individual OCB is the type of citizenship behavior a person’s work group exhibits.
In a work group with low group-level OCB, any individual in that group who engaged in OCB had higher
performance ratings.
g) Job Satisfaction and Counterproductive Behavior:
- When employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, they are likely to engage in counterproductive behaviors. The
problem comes from the difficulty in predicting how they’ll respond.
- One person might quit. Another might respond by using work time to play computer games. And another might
verbally abuse a coworker.
- If managers want to control the undesirable consequences of job dissatisfaction, they’d be better off attacking the
problem - job dissatisfaction - than trying to control the different employee responses. A good start is
understanding the source of dissatisfaction.

2. Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment:

- Job involvement is 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 his or her self-worth.
- High levels of job involvement have been found to be related to fewer absences, lower resignation rates, and higher
employee engagement with their work.
- Organizational commitment is the degree to which an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and
wishes to maintain membership in that organization.
- Research suggests that organizational commitment also leads to lower levels of both absenteeism and turnover and, in fact,
is a better indicator of turnover than job satisfaction. Because it’s a more global and enduring response to the
organization than satisfaction with a particular job.
- It could be becoming an outmoded measure as the number of workers who change employers increases.
- Although the commitment of an employee to an organization may not be as important as it once was, research about
perceived organizational support - employees’ general belief about their organization values their contribution and cares
about their well-being - shows that the commitment of the organization to the employee can be beneficial.
- High levels of perceived organizational support lead to increased job satisfaction and lower turnover.
3. Employee Engagement:
- Managers want their employees to be connected to, satisfied with, and enthusiastic about their jobs. This concept is known
as employee engagement.
- Highly engaged employees are passionate about and deeply connected to their work, and disengaged employees have
essentially “checked out” and don’t care. They show up for work, but have no energy or passion for it.
- Some factors contributing to employee engagement: respect, type of work, work-life balance, providing good service to
customers, base pay, people you work with, benefits, long-term career potential, learning and development,
opportunities, flexible work, promotion opportunities, and variable pay/bonuses.
- A number of benefits come from having highly engaged employees:
+ First, highly engaged employees are two-and-a-half more likely to be top performers than their less-engaged
coworkers.
+ Companies with highly engaged employees have higher retention rates, which help keep recruiting and training
costs low.
→ Both of these outcomes contribute to superior financial performance.

4. Attitudes and Consistency:

- Research shows that people seek consistency among their attitudes and between their attitudes and behaviors. This tendency
means that individuals try to reconcile differing attitudes and align their attitudes and behaviors so they appear rational
and consistent.
- When they encounter the attitudes, individuals will do something to make it consistent by altering the attitudes, altering
the behavior, or rationalizing the inconsistency.

5. Cognitive Dissonance Theory:

- Cognitive dissonance is any incompatibility or inconsistency between attitudes or between behavior and attitudes. The
theory argued that inconsistency is uncomfortable and that individuals try to reduce the discomfort and, thus, the
dissonance.
- The theory proposes that how hard we’ll try to reduce dissonance is determined by three things:
+ The importance of the factors creating the dissonance.
+ The degree of influence the individual believes he or she has over those factors.
+ The reward that may be involved in dissonance.
 - If the factors creating the dissonance are relatively unimportant, the pressure to correct the inconsistency is low. However,
it those factors are important, individuals may change their behavior, conclude that the dissonant behavior isn’t so
important, change their attitudes, or identify compatible factors that outweigh the dissonant ones.
- How much influence individuals believe they have over the factors also affects their reaction to the dissonance. If they
perceive the dissonance is something about which they have no choice, they won’t be receptive to attitude change or feel a
need to be.
- Finally, rewards also influence the degree to which individuals are motivated to reduce dissonance. Coupling high
dissonance with high rewards tends to reduce the discomfort by motivating the individual to believe that consistency
exists.

6. Attitude Surveys:
- Attitude surveys present that employees with a set of statements or questions eliciting how they feel about their jobs, work
groups, supervisors, or the organization.
- Ideally, the items will be designed to obtain the specific information that managers desire.
- An attitude score is achieved by summing up responses to individual questionnaire items. These scores can then be
averaged for work groups, departments, divisions of the organization as a whole.
- Regularly surveying employee attitudes provides managers with valuable feedback on how employees perceive their
working conditions. The use of regular attitude surveys can alert managers to potential problems and employees’
intentions early so that action can be take to prevent repercussions.

7. Implications for Managers:

- Attitudes warn of potential behavioral problems: If managers want to keep resignations and absences down - especially
among their more productive employees - they’ll want to do things that generate positive job attitudes, and reduce
absenteeism and turnover.
 - Attitudes influence behaviors of employees: Managers should focus on helping employees become more productive to
increase job satisfaction by making work challenging and interesting, providing equitable rewards, creating supportive
working conditions, and encouraging supportive colleagues.
- Managers should also survey employees about their attitudes.
- Managers should know that employees will try to reduce dissonance:
+ Managers might point to external forces such as competitors, customers, or other factors when explaining the need to
perform some work that the individual may have some dissonance about.
+ Or the manager can provide rewards that an individual desires.

III. Personality:
- An individual’s personality is a unique combination of emotional, thought, and behavioral patterns that affect how a person
reacts to situations and interacts with others.
- It’s our natural way of doing things and relating to others. Personality is most often described in terms of measurable traits a
person exhibits.

1. MBTI:
- The 100-question personality-assessment asks people how they usually act or feel in different situations.
- On the basis of their answers, individuals are classified as exhibiting a preference in 4 categories: extraversion or
introversion (E or I), sensing or intuition (S or N), thinking or feeling (T or F), and judging or perceiving (J or P):
+ Extraversion (E) Versus Introversion (I): Individuals showing a preference for extraversion are outgoing, social,
and assertive. They need a work environment that’s varied and action oriented, that lets them be with others, and
that gives them a variety of experiences. Individuals showing a preference for introversion are quiet and shy. They
focus on understanding and prefer a work environment that is quiet and concentrated, that lets them be alone, and
that gives them a chance to explore in depth a limited set of experiences.
+ Sensing (S) Versus Intuition (N): Sensing types are practical and prefer routine and order. They dislike new
problems unless there are standard ways to solve them, have a high need for closure, show patience with routine
details, and tend to be good at precise work. On the other hand, intuition types rely on unconscious processes and
look at the “big picture”. They’re individuals who like solving new problems, dislike doing the same thing over and
over again, jump to conclusions, are impatient with routine details, and dislike taking time for precision.
 + Thinking (T) Versus Feeling (F): Thinking types use reason and logic to handle problems. They’re unemotional
and uninterested in people’s feelings, like analysis and putting things into logical order, are able to reprimand
people and fire them when necessary, may seem hard-hearted, and tend to relate well only to other thinking types.
Feeling types rely on their personal values and emotions. They’re aware of other people and their feelings, like
harmony, need occasional praise, dislike telling people unpleasant things, tend to be sympathetic, and relate well to
most people.
+ Judging (J) Versus Perceiving (P): Judging types want control and prefer their world to be ordered and structured.
They’re good planners, decisive, purposeful, and exacting. They focus on completing a task, make decisions
quickly, and want only the information necessary to get a task done. Perceiving types are flexible and spontaneous.
They’re curious, adaptable, and tolerant. They focus on starting a task, postpone decisions, and want to find out all
about the task before starting it.
- Combining these preferences provides descriptions of 16 personality types, with every person identified with one of the
items in each of the four pairs. Each personality type would approach work and relationships differently - neither one
better than the other, just different.
- The MBTI test is important for managers to know these personality types because they influence the way people interact
and solve problems.
- It has been used to help managers better match employees to certain types of jobs.

2. The Big Five Model:

- The five personality traits in the Big Five Model are:
+ Extraversion: The degree to which someone is sociable, talkative, assertive, and comfortable in relationships with
others.
+ Agreeableness: The degree to which someone is good-natured, cooperative, and trusting.
+ Conscientiousness: The degree to which someone is reliable, responsible, dependable, persistent, and achievement
oriented.
+ Emotional stability: The degree to which someone is calm, enthusiastic, and secure (positive) or tense, nervous,
depressed, and insecure (negative).
+ Openness to experience: The degree to which someone has a wide range of interests and imaginative, fascinated
with novelty, artistically sensitive, and intellectual.
 - The Big Five Model provides more than just a personality framework. Research has shown that important relationships
between these personality dimensions and job performance. One study has shown that employees who score higher in
conscientiousness develop higher levels of job knowledge, probably because highly conscientious people learn more.

3. Additional Personality Insights:

- Locus of Control:
+ Internal locus: People believe they control their own destiny.
+ External locus: People believe their lives are controlled by outside forces, what happens to them in their lives is due
to luck or chance.
→ Employees who are externals are less satisfied in their jobs, more alienated from the work setting, and less involved in
their jobs than those who rate high on internality. A manager might also expect externals to blame a poor performance
evaluation on their boss’s prejudice, their coworkers, or other events outside their control; internals would explain the
same evaluation in terms of their own actions.
- Machiavellianism: An individual high in Machiavellianism is pragmatic, maintains emotional distance, and believe that
ends can justify means. In jobs that require bargaining skills or that have substantial rewards for excelling, high Machs
are productive.
- Self-Esteem: People differ in the degree to which they like or dislike themselves, a trait called self-esteem. It is directly
related to expectations for success:
+ Those high in SE believe they possess the ability they need to succeed at work. Individuals with high SEs will take
more risks in job selection and are more likely to choose unconventional jobs than people with low SE.
+ Low SEs are more susceptible to external influences than high SEs. They are dependent on receiving evaluations
from others. As a result, they’re more likely to seek approval from others and are more prone to conform to the
beliefs and behaviors of those they respect than high SEs.
→ In managerial positions, low SEs will tend to be more concerned with pleasing others and, therefore, will be less likely
to take unpopular stands than high SEs.
+ High SEs are more satisfied with their jobs than low SEs.
- Self Monitoring: The natural ability to “click” with other people may play a significant role in determining career success
and is another personality trait called self-monitoring, which refers to the ability to adjust behavior to external, situational
factors:
 + Individuals high in self-monitoring show considerable adaptability in adjusting their behavior. They’re highly
sensitive to external cues and can behave differently in different situations. High self-monitors are capable of
presenting striking contradictions between their public persona and their private selves.
+ Low self-monitors can’t adjust their behavior. They tend to display their true dispositions and attitudes in every
situation, and there’s high behavioral consistency between who they are and what they do.
+ High self-monitors pay close attention to the behavior of others and more flexible than low self-monitors. In
addition, high self-monitoring managers tend to be more mobile in their careers, receive more promotions (both
internal and cross-organizational), and are more likely to occupy central positions in an organization.
+ The high self-monitor is capable of putting on different “faces” for different audiences, an important trait for
managers who must play multiple, or even contradicting, roles.
- Risk-Taking: People differ in their willingness to take chances.
+ Difference in the propensity to assume or to avoid risk have been shown to affect how long it takes managers to
make a decision and how much information they require before making their choice.
+ High risk-taking managers took less time to make decisions and used less information in making their choices than
low risk-taking managers.
→ To maximize organizational effectiveness, managers should try to align employee risk-taking propensity with specific
job demands.
● Other Personality Traits:
- Type A personality that describes someone who is continually and aggressively struggling to achieve more and
more in less and less time:
+ They subject themselves to continual time pressure and deadlines and have moderate to high levels of stress.
+ They emphasize quantity over quality and managers should be aware that self-imposed pressures could
manifest in hostility.
- A Type B person isn’t harried by the desire to achieve more and more. Type Bs don’t suffer from a sense of time
urgency and are able to relax without guilt, they tend to be less punctual.
- The proactive personality that describes people who identify opportunities, show initiative, take action, and
persevere until meaningful change occurs. Research has shown that proactive have many desirable behaviors that
organizations want.
 - The economic recession prompted a reexamination of resilience, an individual’s ability to overcome challenges and
turn them into opportunities. A resilient person is likely to be more adaptable, flexible, and goal-focused, which
translates into higher productivity and lower absenteeism.
- OB researchers also have to looked at resilience and other individual characteristics, including efficacy, hope, and
optimism in a concept called positive psychological capital. These characteristics have been found to be related to
higher feelings of well-being and less work stress.

4. Personality Types in Different Cultures:

- The Big Five Model appear in almost all cross-cultural studies. Differences are found in the emphasis on dimensions.
- We know that no personality type is common for a given country. Yet a country’s culture influences the dominant
personality characteristics of its people.
- National cultures differ in terms of the degree to which people believe they control their environment.
- For global managers, understanding how personality traits differ takes on added significance when looking at it from the
perspective of national culture.

5. Emotions and Emotional Intelligence:

- Emotions are intense feelings directed at someone or something. They’re direct object specific; that is, emotions are
reactions to an object.
- Research has identified six universal emotions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise.
- People respond differently to identical emotion-provoking stimuli. In some cases, differences can be attributed to a
person’s personality and because people vary in their ability to express emotions.
- At other times how people respond emotionally is a result of job requirements. Jobs make different demands in terms of
what types and how much emotions needs to be displayed.
- Emotional intelligence is the ability to notice and to manage emotional cues and information. It’s composed of five
dimensions:
+ Self-awareness: The ability to be aware of what you’re feeling.
+ Self-management: The ability to manage one’s own emotions and impulses.
+ Self-motivation: The ability to persist in the face of setbacks and failure.
+ Empathy: The ability to sense how others are feeling.
+ Social skills: The ability to handle the emotions of others.
 - EI has been shown to be positively related to job performance at all levels. It appears to be relevant to success in jobs that
demand a high degree of social interaction.

6. Implications for Managers:

- The Holland’s Personality-Job Fit Theory states that an employee’s satisfaction with his or her job, as well as his or her
likelihood of leaving that job, depends on the degree to which the individual’s personality matches the job environment.
- Holland’s theory proposes that satisfaction is highest and turnover is lowest when personality and occupation are
compatible. The key points of this theory is that:
+ Intrinsic differences in personality are apparent among individuals.
+ The types of jobs vary.
+ People in job environments compatible with their personality types should be more satisfied and less likely to
resign voluntarily than people in incongruent jobs.
PERSONALITY
TYPE SAMPLE OCCUPATIONS
CHARACTERISTICS

Realistic: Prefers physical activities that require skill, Shy, genuine, persistent, stable, Mechanic, drill press operator, assembly-
strength, and coordination. conforming, practical. line, worker, farmer.

Investigative: Prefers activities involving thinking, Analytical, original, curious, Biologist, economist, mathematicians,
organizing, and understanding. independent. news reporter.

Social: Prefers activities that involve helping and Sociable, friendly, cooperative, Social worker, teacher, counselor, clinical
developing others. understanding. psychologist.

Conventional: Prefers rule-regulated, orderly, and Conforming, efficient, practical, Accountant, corporate manager, bank
unambiguous activities. unimaginative, inflexible. teller, file clerk.

Enterprising: Prefer verbal activities that offer Self-confident, ambitious, energetic, Lawyer, real estate agent, public relations
opportunities to influence others and attain power. domineering. specialist, small business manager.
 Artistic: Prefers ambiguous and unsystematic Imaginative, disorderly, idealistic, Painter, musician, writer, inferior
activities that allow creative expression. emotional, impractical. decorator.
- By recognizing that people approach problem solving, decision making, and job interactions differently, a manager can
better understand why an employee is uncomfortable with making quick decisions or why another employee insists on
gathering as much information as possible before addressing a problem.
- Being a successful manager and accomplishing goals means working well together with others both inside and outside the
organization. To work effectively together, you need to understanding each other by first appreciating personality traits
and emotions.
- And one of the skills you have to develop as a manager is learning to fine-tune your emotional reactions according to the
situation.

IV. Perception:
- Perception is a process by which we give meaning to our environment by organizing and interpreting sensory impressions.
- Research on perception consistently demonstrates thar individuals may look at the same thing yet perceive it differently.

1. Factors That Influence Perception:

- The perceiver: When a person looks at a target and attempts to interpret what he or she sees, the individual’s personal
characteristics will heavily influence the interpretation. These personal characteristics include attitudes, personality,
motives, interests, experiences, or expectations.
- The characteristics of the target being observed can also affect what’s perceived.
- The relationship of a target to its background also influences perception, as does our tendency to group close things and
similar things together.
- The context in which we see objects or events is also important. The time at which an object is seen can influence
perception, as can location, light, heat, color, any number of other situational factors.

2. Attribution Theory:
- Attribution theory was developed to explain how we judge people differently depending on what meaning we attribute to a
given behavior.
- Basically, the theory suggests that when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was
internally or externally caused:
 + Internally caused behavior are those believed to be under the personal control of the individual.
+ Externally caused behavior results from outside factors; that is, the person is forced into the behavior by the
situation.
- That determination depends on three factors: distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency:
+ Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays different behaviors in different situations. If it’s unusual,
the observer is likely to attribute the behavior to external forces, something beyond the control of the person.
However, if the behavior isn’t unusual, it will probably be judged as internal.
+ If everyone who’s faced with a similar situation responds in the same way, we can say the behavior shows
consensus. From an attribution perspective, if consensus is high, you’re likely to give an external attribution.
Otherwise, you would conclude that the cause of the behavior is internal.
+ An observer looks for consistency in a person’s actions. The more consistent the behavior, the more the observer is
inclined to attribute it to internal causes.

- Errors or biases distort our attributions:

+ Fundamental attribution error: When we make judgements about the behavior of other people, we have a tendency
to underestimate the influence of external factors and to overestimate the influence of internal or personal factors.
+ Self-serving bias: The tendency to attribute our own success to internal factors, while putting the blame for
personal failure on external factors.

3. Shortcuts Used in Judging Others:

- In assumed similarity, or the “like me” effect, the observer’s perception of others is influenced more by the observer’s
own characteristics than by those of the person observed.
 - When we judge someone on the basis of our perception of a group he or she is part of, we’re using the shortcut called
stereotyping. To the degree that a stereotype is based on fact, it may produce accurate judgements. However, many
stereotypes aren’t factual and distort our judgment.
- When we form a general impression about a person on the basis of a single characteristic, such as intelligence, sociability,
or appearance, we’re influenced by the halo effect.

4. Implications for Managers:

- Managers need to recognize that their employees react to perceptions, not to reality.
- Employees organize and interpret what they see, so the potential for perceptual distortion is always present. The message
is clear: Pay attention to how employees perceive both their jobs and management actions.

V. Learning:
- Learning is included in our discussion of individual behavior for the obvious reason that almost all behavior is learned.
- Learning is any relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience. It is a continuous, life-long
process.
- The principles of learning can be used to shape behavior.

1. Operant Conditioning:
- Operant conditioning argues that behavior is a function of its consequences. People learn to behave to get something they
want or avoid something they don’t want.
- Operant behavior is voluntary or learned behavior, not reflexive or unlearned behavior.
- The tendency to repeat learned behavior is influenced by reinforcement or lack of reinforcement that happens as a result
of the behavior:
+ Reinforcement strengthens a behavior and increases the likelihood that it will be repeated.
+ Lack of reinforcement weakens a behavior and lessens the likelihood that it will be repeated.
- Behaviors are learned by making rewards contingent to behaviors.
- Behaviors that is rewarded (positively reinforced) is likely to be repeated. Behavior that is punished or ignored is less
likely to be repeated.
2. Social Learning:
- Individuals can also learn by observing what happens to other people or just by being told about something as well as by
direct experiences, this view is called social learning.
- The influence of others is central to the social learning viewpoint. The amount of influence these models have on an
individual is determined by four processes:
+ Attentional processes: People learn from a model when they recognize and pay attention to its critical features.
We’re most influenced by models who are attractive, repeatedly available, thought to be important, or seen as
similar to us.
+ Retention processes: A model’s influence will depend on how well the individual remembers the model’s action,
even after the model is no longer readily available.
+ Motor reproduction processes: After a person has seen a new behavior by observing the model, the watching must
become doing. This process then demonstrates that the individual can actually do the modeled activities.
+ Reinforcement processes: Individuals will be motivated to exhibit the modeled behavior if positive incentives or
rewards are provided. Behaviors that are reinforced will be given more attention, learned better, and performed
more often.

3. Shaping: A Managerial Tool:

- Managers will often attempt to “mold” individuals by guiding their learning in graduated steps, through a method called
shaping behavior to behave in ways that most benefit the organization.
- If the manager reinforced the individual only when he or she showed desirable responses, the opportunity for
reinforcement might occur too infrequently. We shape behavior by systematically reinforcing each successive step that
moves the individual closer to the desired behavior.
- Four ways to shape behavior include:
+ Positive reinforcement: When a behavior is followed by something pleasant, such as praising an employee for a job
well done, it’s called positive reinforcement. It increases the likelihood that the desired behavior will be repeated.
+ Negative reinforcement: Rewarding a response by eliminating or withdrawing something unpleasant.
+ Punishment: penalizes undesirable behavior and will eliminate it.
+ Extinction: eliminating any reinforcement that’s maintaining a behavior. When a behavior isn’t reinforced, it
gradually disappears.
 - Both positive and negative reinforcement result in learning. They strengthen a desired behavior and increase the
probability that the desired behavior will be repeated.
- Both punishment and extinction also result in learning, but do so by weakening an undesired behavior and decreasing its
frequency.

4. Implications for Managers:

- The issue is whether managers are going to manage their learning through the rewards they allocate and the examples they
set, or allow it to occur haphazardly.
- If marginal employees are rewarded with pay raises and promotions, they will have little reason to change their behavior.
In fact, productive employees who see marginal performance rewarded might change their behavior.
- Similarly, managers should expect that employees will look to them as models. Good manager behavior will promote good
employee behavior.

VI. Contemporary Issues in Organizational Behavior:

1. Managing Generational Differences in the Workplace:
GEN Y CHARACTERISTICS GEN Y WORKERS

- 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 their status quo.
- Have grown up with technology.
- High Expectations of Self: They aim to work faster and better than other workers.
- High Expectations of Employers: They want fair and direct managers who are highly
engaged in their professional development.
- Ongoing Learning: They seek out creative challenges and view colleagues as vast
resources from whom to gain knowledge.
- Immediate Responsibility: They want to make an important impact on Day 1.
- Goal-Oriented: They want small goals with tight deadlines so they can build up
ownership of tasks.

GEN Z CHARACTERISTICS GEN Z WORKERS

- Express themselves with their own styles. - Digital natives: 91% want an employee with sophisticated technology.
- Tend to travel more. - Diversity: 77% want an employee that values cultural differences.
- Demand 24h access. - Independence: 69% prefer a private office over a open workplace.
- Born to swipe.
- Masters of social media.
- Video messages + texting.

2. Managing Negative Behavior in the Workplace:

- Tolerating negative behavior sends the wrong message to other employees.
- Both preventive and responsive actions to negative behaviors are needed:
+ Screening potential employees.
+ Responding immediately and decisively to unacceptable behavior.
+ Paying attention to employee attitudes.