Professional Documents
Culture Documents
C H A P T E R
T W O
Individual Behavior
and Learning
Individual Behavior and
Learning
• Four factors that affect individual behavior in
organizations:
• Drive Behavior
– Motivation
– Ability
• Provide opportunities and constraints
– Role perceptions
– Situational Contingencies
Model of Individual Behavior
Role
Perceptions
Motivation
Individual
Behavior and
Performance
Ability
Situational
Contingencies
Employee Motivation
• Forces within a person that drive his or her
direction, intensity, and persistence of
voluntary behavior
• Direction - goal oriented
• Intensity - amount of effort
• Persistence - continuing effort
Ability
• Natural Aptitudes
– based on talents, size, capabilities
– cannot be learned, or acquired
• Learned Capabilities
– can be taught and learned
– physical and mental skills
• Competency vs Person Job Fit
– Generic competencies not specific task abilities
Assessing Competencies at EMC
When EMC was about to
dramatically expand its work
force, an executive team at the
enterprise storage products firm
developed an “Employee Success
Profile.” This list of generic
competencies represented the traits
of successful employees, such as
goal-orientation and integrity.
Courtesy of EMC Corp.
Roles
• Role Perceptions - beliefs about what behaviors
are appropriate or necessary in a particular
situation, including job tasks, relative importance,
and preferred behaviors to accomplish those tasks
• Role Problems
– Role Overload
– Role Conflict
– Role Ambiguity
Situational Contingencies
• Environmental Factors outside of employee
control that constrain or facilitate their
behavior and/or performance
• Law of effect
– likelihood that an operant behavior will be
repeated depends on its consequences
A-B-Cs of OB Modification
Antecedents Behavior Consequences
Example
Employee Employee
Attendance
attends receives
bonus system
scheduled attendance
is announced
work bonus
Contingencies of Reinforcement
Consequence No Consequence
is Introduced Consequence is Removed
Behavior
Increases/ Positive Negative
Maintained reinforcement reinforcement
Co-worker
Evaluated Co-worker
Employee
Subordinate Subordinate
Subordinate
Giving Feedback Effectively
Specific
Credible Timely
Social Learning Theory
(Bandura, 1990)
• Cognitive and environmental process combine to
facilitate learning
• Behavioral modeling, Vicarious Learning
– Observing and modeling behavior of others
• Learning behavior consequences
– Observing consequences that others experience
• Self-reinforcement
– Reinforcing our own behavior with consequences
within our control
• Rewards signal information about self
Learning Through Experience
• Benefits of experiential learning
– Helps acquire tacit knowledge/skills
– Allows implicit learning
• Practicing experiential learning
– Reward experimentation
– Recognize mistakes as part of learning
– Action learning -- investigating a real problem
• Success experience increase self-efficacy