BA 352 Exam #1

Which of the following is an example of a daily hassle?

office equipment malfunctions

One of the reasons why job performance should be defined only in terms of behaviors, and not in terms of results, is that results are

often influenced by factors that are beyond the employee's control.

Organizational commitment is defined as a set of actions that employees perform to avoid the work situation—behaviors that may eventually culminate in quitting the organization.

false

The "dead man's curve" and "rank and yank" are nicknames for behaviorally anchored rating scales.

false

Sabotage is a form of property deviance that represents the purposeful destruction of physical equipment, organizational processes, or company products.

true

Satisfaction with the work itself reflects employees' feelings about their actual work tasks and has the strongest influence on overall job satisfaction.

true

Which of the following statements is an expression of normative commitment?

My organization gave me my start . . . they hired me when others thought I was not qualified.

Which of the following best explains why the Type A Behavior Pattern is often seen in leaders and senior managers?

Type A people have traits valued by organizations.

One step in the bounded rationality decision-making process is to

boil the problem down to something that is easily understood

How does job satisfaction positively affect job performance?

by increasing task performance

_____ possess high commitment and low task performance but perform many of the voluntary "extrarole" activities that are needed to make the organization function smoothly.

citizens

Responsibility for outcomes reflects the degree to which work tasks are viewed as something that"counts" in the employee's system of philosophies and beliefs.

false

Role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload are all examples of work challenge stressors.

false

The Rule of One-Eighth states that at best 8 percent of all organizations will actually do what is required to build profits by putting people first.

false

The definition of job performance encompasses only positive behaviors, not negative ones.

false

Behaviors are reinforced after a certain number of them have been exhibited under a ______ schedule of reinforcement

fixed ratio

Which of the following is the most widely used supportive practice among small, medium, and large companies?

flextime

__________ refers to the people, places and things that inspire a desire to remain part of an organization.

focus of commitment

_____ is the use of work time and resources to complete something other than job duties, such as assignments for another job.

moonlighting

Which motivating force has the strongest effect on performance?

self-efficacy or competance

_____ are defined as a collection of assertions—both verbal and symbolic—that specify how and why variables are related, as well as the conditions in which they should (and should not) be related.

theories

_____ contracts are based on a narrow set of specific monetary obligations

transactional

When the knowledge, skills, and behaviors used on the job are maintained by the learner once the period of learning ends, and generalized to the workplace once the learner returns to the job, this is known as

transfer of training

According to expectancy theory, motivational force equals zero if expectancy, instrumentality, or valence is zero.

true

According to the erosion model of organizational commitment, the employee with the fewest emotional bonds is the most likely to quit.

true

An employee with a high Vwant value in an organization supplying him or her with a low Vhave value is dissatisfied if the value is important to the employee.

true

Attitude surveys can be used to explore the effectiveness of major job changes

true

Benign job demands are job demands that tend not to be appraised as stressful.

true

Emotion-focused coping is used by employees when they feel they have no control over the stressful environment

true

Employees who experience higher levels of challenge stressors also tend to have higher levels of job performance and organizational commitment.

true

Employees who feel a sense of equity on the job are more likely to engage in citizenship behaviors.

true

Employees with higher levels of expertise may become more highly valued commodities on the job market, thereby reducing their levels of continuance commitment.

true

Job satisfaction is an individual mechanism that captures what employees feel when thinking about their jobs and doing their day-to-day work.

true

People of the Type A Behavior Pattern add to the creation of a stressful environment.

true

Psychological contracts are beliefs about reciprocal obligations influenced by the recruitment and socialization activities that employees experience.

true

Showing new employees the ropes when they first arrive on the job is an example of interpersonal citizenship behavior.

true

Socially complex resources like culture, teamwork, trust, and reputation add value to an organization.

true

The performance-avoid orientation is associated with high levels of anxiety and lower levels of learning.

true

Tacit knowledge is

typically job- or situation-specific

Which of the following is true of diversity in the workplace?

Diversity makes it more challenging to retain valued employees by reducing affective and continuance commitment.

Which of the following describes an emotion?

I hate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

Which of the following is true of organizational behavior?

It is a field of study devoted to understanding the attitudes and behaviors of individuals and groups in organizations.

Which of the following is true of motivation?

It is a set of energetic forces that originates both within and outside an employee.

Which of the following is true according to the Rule of One-Eighth?

One-half of the firms that make comprehensive changes will persist with their practices long enough to actually derive economic benefits.

Which of the following is true of stress?

Stress depends on both the nature of the demand and the person who confronts it.

Which of the following is a consequence of high job identity?

The employee feels annoyed about not getting a job finished.

Which of the following describes the relationship between challenge stressors and job performance?

There is a weak positive correlation.

If a scatter plot comparing two variables results in a straight line, which of the following best describes the correlation between the two variables?

They show a perfect correlation of 1.0

Which of the following is specifically identified with job significance?

a sense of value to society

The scientific method begins with

a theory

Which of the following conditions describes a physiological strain?

a weakening of the immune system

Employee responses to task demands that are novel, unusual, or unpredictable are known as

adaptive task performance

In the method of _____ way of knowing things, people hold firmly to some belief because some respected official, agency, or source has said it is so.

authority

Which of the following is an example of a cognitive method of emotion-focused coping?

avoiding

A formalized method of training in which employees observe and learn from employees with significant amounts of tacit knowledge is known as ______ training.

behavior modeling

Organizations identify the behaviors that underlie task performance by

conducting a job analysis

The most consequential use of motivational concepts within organizations is in

creating compensation systems

Motivation is a set of distinctive, external forces.

false

The process of generating and choosing from a set of alternatives to solve a problem is called

decision making

Which of the following is a "hidden cost" of employee turnover?

decreased morale

Negative reinforcement occurs when there is the removal of a consequence following an unwanted behavior.

false

Of the knowledge contained in organizations, 90 percent is explicit knowledge.

false

Which of the following is responsible for the fluctuation of job satisfaction that occurs within a day?

employee's emotions

Bernadette would like to generate intrinsic motivation in her employees because she feels it will ultimately lead to better performance. Which of the following outcomes would foster the intrinsic motivation she wants?

enjoyment

Geraldo is talking about his new job with his brother. He says he likes this job better than his previous jobs because now he feels respected, and he knows he is doing important work. He has always felt a need to feel this way at work, and now he finally does. Geraldo is describing how his job meets his need for

esteem

Affective commitment is defined as a desire to remain a member of an organization because of awareness of the costs associated with leaving it.

false

Citizens possess low levels of both organizational commitment and task performance and exert the minimum level of effort needed to keep their jobs.

false

Creative task performance involves employee responses to task demands that are novel, unusual, or, at the very least, unpredictable.

false

Disciplinary actions, demotions, and terminations are typical examples of "positively valenced" outcomes.

false

Group mechanisms include organizational structure and organizational culture.

false

Human resource management focuses on the product choices and industry characteristics that affect an organization's profitability.

false

Job satisfaction is negatively correlated with citizenship behavior.

false

Learning refers to the process of generating and choosing from a set of alternatives to solve a problem.

false

Meaningfulness is a concept in psychological empowerment that reflects a sense of choice in the initiation and continuation of work tasks.

false

An example of political deviance is

gossip

Ike, George, and Mike work at an ice producing facility in the same job classification. Ike arrives at work late, produces and loads fewer bags of ice than George and Mike, and never volunteers to sweep up during his break, unlike the other workers. After talking to George and Mike, Ike learns that even though they have all been employed the same length of time, he is being paid two dollars more per hour than they are because they were hired through an outside personnel agency. According to equity theory, which of the following emotions is Ike likely to display?

guilt

Serious interpersonal counterproductive behaviors include

harassment

With regard to the value-percept theory, which of the following conditions for a value would result in a high level of employee dissatisfaction?

high Vwant , low Vhave, and high Vimportance

Goal-setting theory argues that assigning employees specific, difficult goals will result in

higher levels of performance

Which of the following is something a company could do to foster bonding and affective commitment?

hold a weekly "employee appreciation" party

Blaze feels his workers need to know they are doing something that makes a difference to the company. Blaze walks around among his employees and uses phrases such as "moving forward,""being on track," and "getting there" to convey a sense of

impact

Emotionally charged judgments that arise through quick, non-conscious, and holistic associations are known as

intuition

Interpersonal citizenship behavior

is particularly important in a small group context

The moderate correlation between learning and job performance may be underestimated because

it is difficult to measure tacit knowledge, which is relevant to task performance, due to its unspoken nature

Which of the following qualities of an organization adds to the value of its resources by making it inimitable?

its people

Which one of the following is an individual outcome of interest to organizational behavior researchers?

job performance

_____ refers to how you feel about your work and what you think about your work.

job satisfaction

A management philosophy that bases an employee's evaluations on whether the employee achieves specific, mutually agreed-upon performance goals is known as

management by objectives

Changes in the workplace over the last few decades can be summed up as a(n)

move away from physical, industrial jobs toward knowledge work and service work.

Mentally "checking out" and going through the motions at work is a reaction known as

neglect

Spending money to train and develop employees is a means of fostering

normative commitment

_____ is an example of a behavioral strain resulting from prolonged stress

overeating

Gilbert would like to foster goal commitment in his department. He decides to do this by encouraging the collaboration of employees and leaders on setting the specific proficiency level and due date for a major production goal so that the employees feel a sense of ownership over the goal. Gilbert has implemented a strategy known as

participation

Which of the following is an individual characteristic of employees that improves individual mechanisms such as stress and motivation?

personality

Which one of the following is an example of a nonwork challenge stressor?

positive life events

A decision that is somewhat automatic because people's knowledge allows them to recognize and identify a situation and the course of action that needs to be taken is known as a(n) ______ decision

programmed

Norcraft, Inc. usually moves new employees to a higher position within a year and fills most of its higher-level positions internally, resulting in a satisfied workforce as well as cost saving through lower turnover of employees. Which facet of job satisfaction has Norcraft fostered?

promotion satisfaction

Which of the five satisfaction facets is most likely to be viewed as undesirable by an employee?

promotion satisfaction

Which of the following is an example of a positive emotion?

relief

Which of the following describes a process of cognitive distortion?

restoration of balance mentally without altering behavior as a consequence of equity distress

Well-known responses to demands that occur in a normal, predictable way are known as

routine task performance

Which of the following is a characteristic trait of a bad coworker?

seems to always be looking for something else, even if it is not better

The tendency for people to see their environment only as it affects them and as it is consistent with their expectations is known as

selective perception

Maintaining a good attitude with coworkers, even when they have done something annoying or when the unit is going through tough times, is known as

sportsmanship

A sabbatical involves

taking time off from work to engage in an alternative activity.