Chapter 14: Understanding Individual Behavior
Emotion
A mental state that arises spontaneously within a person based on interaction with the environment rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI™)
A widely used test that measures how people differ on all four of Jung's sets of paired opposites--introversion versus extroversion, sensation versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perceiving.
Organizational commitment
An employee's loyalty to and engagement with one's work organization.
Grit
An individual's passion and persistence for achieving a long-term goal.
Stress
An individual's physiological and emotional response to external stimuli that create physical or psychological demands that exceed the individual's knowledge, abilities, or resources when important outcomes are at stake.
Self-efficacy
An individual's strong belief that he or she can successfully accomplish a specific task or outcome.
Self-awareness
Being conscious of internal aspects of yourself, such as personality traits, beliefs, emotions, attitudes, and perceptions, and appreciating how your patterns affect other people.
Big Five personality factors
Dimensions that describe an individual's extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience.
Perceptual distortions
Errors in perceptual judgment that arise from inaccuracies in any part of the perception process.
Self-confidence
General assurance in one's own ideas, judgment, and capabilities.
Role conflict
Incompatible demands of different roles.
Attributions
Judgments about what caused a person's behavior—something about the person or something about the situation.
Blind spots
Personal attributes that the person isn't aware of or doesn't recognize as problems, which limit effectiveness and hinder success.
Negativity bias
Term used in psychology to describe how the human mind reacts more quickly and strongly to perceived bad things than it does to good things.
Self-management
The ability to engage in self-regulating thoughts and behavior to accomplish all your tasks and handle difficult or challenging situations.
Authoritarianism
The belief that power and status differences should exist within an organization.
Resilience
The capacity to persevere and to bounce back from adversity, conflict, and failure.
Perception
The cognitive process that people use to make sense out of the environment by selecting, organizing, and interpreting information from that environment.
Job satisfaction
The degree to which a person finds fulfillment in his or her job.
Openness to experience
The degree to which a person has a broad range of interests and is imaginative, creative, artistically sensitive, and willing to consider new ideas.
Agreeableness
The degree to which a person is able to get along with others by being good-natured, likable, cooperative, forgiving, understanding, and trusting.
Emotional stability
The degree to which a person is calm, enthusiastic, and self-confident, rather than tense, depressed, moody, or insecure.
Conscientiousness
The degree to which a person is focused on a few goals, thus behaving in ways that are responsible, dependable, persistent, and achievement oriented.
Extroversion
The degree to which a person is outgoing, sociable, assertive, and comfortable with interpersonal relationships.
Halo effect
The perceiver develops an overall impression of a person or situation based on one characteristic, either favorable or unfavorable.
Personality
The set of characteristics that underlie a relatively stable pattern of behavior in response to ideas, objects, or people in the environment.
Emotional contagion
The tendency of people to absorb and express the emotions, moods, and attitudes of those around them.
Stereotyping
The tendency to assign an individual to a group or broad category and then to attribute generalizations about the group to the individual.
Machiavellianism
The tendency to direct one's behavior toward the acquisition of power and the manipulation of other people for purely personal gain.
Self-serving bias
The tendency to overestimate the contribution of internal factors to one's own successes and the contribution of external factors to one's own failures.
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors on another person's mistakes and failures and to overestimate the influence of internal factors.
Role ambiguity
Uncertainty about what behaviors are expected of a person in a particular role.
