MADM701 - M3

Steps that can lead to successful organizational socialization include:

1. Provide a challenging first job. 2. Provide relevant training. 3. Provide timely and consistent feedback. 4. Select a good first supervisor to be in charge of socialization. 5. Design a relaxed orientation program. 6. Place new recruits in work groups with high morale. Specific techniques of socializing new employees would include the use of mentors or role models, orientation and training programs, reward systems, and career planning.

What are the 4 subprocess of perception?

1. Situation/Stimulus. 2. Feedback/Interpretation. 3. Resulting Behavior. 4. Environmental Consequences.

What Is Meant by Job Satisfaction?

Locke gives a comprehensive definition of job satisfaction as involving cognitive, affective, and evaluative reactions or attitudes and states it is "a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experience." Job satisfaction is a result of employees' perception of how well their job provides those things that are viewed as important. It is generally recognized in the organizational behavior field that job satisfaction is the most important and frequently studied employee attitude.

Modern Developmental Psychology

Modern developmental psychology does not get into the argument of heredity versus environment or of maturation (changes that result from heredity and physical development) versus learning. The human being consists of both physiological and psychological interacting parts. Therefore, heredity, the brain, environment, maturation, and learning all contribute to the human personality.

OCBs and Fair Treatment

Motivational dimensions, job satisfaction,and organizational commitment clearly relate to OCBs. More important to OCBs, however, is that employees must perceive that they are being treated fairly, that the procedures and outcomes are fair. A number of studies have found a strong relationship between justice and OCBs.

Employee Turnover : Boon or Bust?

On an overall basis, however, it is accurate to say that job satisfaction is important in employee turnover. Although absolutely no turnover is not necessarily beneficial to the organization, a low turnover rate is usually desirable because of the considerable training costs and the drawbacks of inexperience, plus the loss of the tacit knowledge that those who leave take with them.

Other Effects and Ways to Enhance Satisfaction

Research reports that highly satisfied employees tend to have better physical health, learn new job-related tasks more quickly, have fewer on-the-job accidents, and file fewer grievances. it has been found that there is a strong negative relationship between job satisfaction and perceived stress. In other words, by building satisfaction, stress may be reduced.

Rogers and Maslow's humanistic theory

Self-actualization and the drive to realize one's potential

The following are some organizational examples that point out the difference between sensation and perception:

1. The division manager purchases a program that she thinks is best, not the program that the software engineer says is best. 2. An associate's answer to a question is based on what he heard the boss say, not on what the boss actually said. 3. The same team member may be viewed by one colleague as a very hard worker and by another as a slacker. 4. The same product may be viewed by the design team to be of high quality and by a customer to be of low quality.

Job Satisfaction and Performance : Departmental Level

Also, research evidence indicates that satisfaction may not necessarily lead to individual performance improvement, but does lead to departmental and organizational-level improvement. A meta-analysis of such business units (7,939 in 36 companies) found that when satisfaction is defined and measured by employee engagement, there is a significant relationship with performance outcomes of productivity, customer satisfaction, and even profit.

Motivation

A process that starts with a physiological or psychological deficiency or need that activates a behavior or a drive that is aimed at a goal or incentive. The key to understanding the process of motivation lies in the meaning of, and relationships among, needs, drives, and incentives

Covert vs. Overt Behavior

As a result of perception, an employee may move rapidly or slowly (overt behavior) or make a self-evaluation (covert behavior).

What are the major OCBs?

(1) Altruism (e.g., helping out when a coworker is not feeling well). (2) Conscientiousness (e.g., staying late to finish a project). (3) Civic Virtue (e.g., volunteering for a community program to represent the firm). (4) Sportsmanship (e.g., sharing failure of a team project that would have been successful by following the member's advice). (5) Courtesy (e.g., being understanding and empathetic even when provoked).

What are the 4 personality dimensions of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)?

(1) Introversion/extraversion. (2) Perceiving/judging. (3) Sensing/intuition. (4) Thinking/feeling. Jung felt that although people had all four of these dimensions in common, they differ in the combination of their preferences of each. Importantly, he made the point that one's preferences were not necessarily better than another's, only different.

Other variables that enter into an employee's decision to quit:

1. Age, tenure in the organization, and commitment to the organization may play a role. 2. Some people cannot see themselves working anywhere else, so they remain regardless of how dissatisfied they feel. 3. Another factor is the general economy. When things in the economy are going well and there is little unemployment, typically there will be an increase in turnover because people will begin looking for better opportunities with other organizations. Even if they are satisfied, many people are willing to leave if the opportunities elsewhere promise to be better. 4. Research findings verify that unemployment rates do directly affect turnover.

Guidelines to Enhance Organizational Commitment

1. Commit to people-first values. Put it in writing, hire the right-kind managers, and walk the talk. 2. Clarify and communicate your mission. Clarify the mission and ideology; make it charismatic; use value-based hiring practices; stress values-based orientation and training; build the tradition. 3. Guarantee organizational justice. Have a comprehensive grievance procedure; provide for extensive two-way communications. 4. Create a sense of community. Build value-based homogeneity; share and share alike; emphasize barnraising, cross-utilization, and teamwork; get together. 5. Support employee development. Commit to actualizing; provide first-year job challenge; enrich and empower; promote from within; provide developmental activities; provide employee security without guarantees.

What are the Big Five personality traits?

1. Conscientiousness. 2. Emotional Stability. 3. Agreeableness. 4. Extraversion. 5. Openness to Experience. The real value of the Big Five to organizational behavior is that it does bring back the importance of predispositional traits, and these traits have been clearly shown to relate to job performance. Importantly, it should also be noted that these five traits are quite stable. Although there is not total agreement, most personality theorists would tend to agree that after about 30 years of age, the individual's personality profile will change little over time.

Two dimensions of supervisory style that affect job satisfaction:

1. Employee-Centeredness; The degree to which a supervisor takes personal interest and cares about the employee. It commonly is manifested in ways such as checking to see how well the employee is doing, providing advice and assistance to the individual, and communicating with the associate on a personal as well as an official level. 2. Participation or Influence; Illustrated by managers who allow their people to participate in decisions that affect their own jobs. In most cases, this leads to higher job satisfaction. A participative climate create by supervisors seems to have a more substantial effect on worker satisfaction than participation in a specific dimension.

The current thinking on the halo effect can be summarized from the extensive research literature as follows:

1. It is a common rater error. 2. It has both true and illusory components. 3. It has led to inflated correlations among rating dimensions and is due to the influence of a general evaluation and specific judgments. 4. It has negative consequences and should be avoided or removed. Research concludes that we still do not know much about the impact of the halo effect and attempts at solving the problem have not yet been very successful.

3 Generally Accepted Dimensions to Job Satisfaction:

1. Job satisfaction is an emotional response to a job situation. 2. Job satisfaction is often determined by how well outcomes meet or exceed expectations. 3. Job satisfaction represents several related attitudes.

Evidence-based guidelines that may help enhance job satisfaction:

1. Make jobs more fun. World-class companies such as Southwest Airlines have a fun culture for their employees. Southwest management makes it clear that irreverence is okay; it's okay to be yourself; and take the competition seriously, but not yourself. Having a fun culture may not make jobs themselves more satisfying, but it does break up boredom and lessen the chances of dissatisfaction. 2. Have fair pay, benefits, and promotion opportunities. These are obvious ways that organizations typically try to keep their employees satisfied. Recent national surveys indicate that employees rank benefits and pay as very important to their job satisfaction. As Chapter 4 pointed out, an important way to make benefits more effective would be to provide a flexible, so-called cafeteria approach. This allows employees to choose their own distribution of benefits within the budgeted amount available. This way there would be no discrepancies between what they want, because it's their choice. 3. Match people with jobs that fit their interests and skills. Getting the right fit is one of the most important, but overlooked, ways to have satisfied employees. This, of course, assumes that the organization knows what those interests and skills are. Effective human resource management firms such as Disney, Southwest Airlines, Google, and Microsoft put considerable effort into finding out interests and skills of potential new hires, as well as existing employees, in order to make the match or fit with the right job. 4. Design jobs to make them exciting and satisfying. Instead of finding people to fit the job as in point 3, this approach suggests designing jobs to fit the people. Most people do not find boring, repetitive work very satisfying. For example, the Canadian aerospace firm Nordavionics was losing too many of their talented engineers. They found that they could increase job satisfaction and reduce turnover by being more sensitive to and providing their engineers with more challenging work and professional growth. Unfortunately, too many jobs today are boring and should be changed or eliminated as much as possible. Improvements include providing more responsibility and building in more variety, significance, identity, autonomy, and feedback.

Characteristics of the person being perceived that influence social perception:

1. The status of the person perceived will greatly influence others' perception of the person. 2. The person being perceived is usually placed into categories to simplify the viewer's perceptual activities. Two common categories are status and role. 3. The visible traits of the person perceived will greatly influence others' perception of the person. These characteristics of the perceiver and the perceived suggest the complexity of social perception. Organizational participants must realize that their perceptions of another person are greatly influenced by their own characteristics and the characteristics of the other person.

Five job dimensions have been identified to represent the most important characteristics of a job about which employees have affective responses:

1. The work itself. The extent to which the job provides the individual with interesting tasks, opportunities for learning, and the chance to accept responsibility. 2. Pay. The amount of financial remuneration that is received and the degree to which this is viewed as equitable vis-á-vis that of others in the organization. 3. Promotion opportunities. The chances for advancement in the organization. 4. Supervision. The abilities of the supervisor to provide technical assistance and behavioral support. 5. Coworkers. The degree to which fellow workers are technically proficient and socially supportive. These five dimensions were formulated many years ago and have been widely used to measure job satisfaction over the years, and a meta-analysis confirmed their construct validity.

Brain Dominance Theory

A cognitive model that identifies specific functions of the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain. As to neuropsychology, breakthroughs in brain-scanning technology, called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), allow measurement of brain activity by mapping specific regions that are linked to specialized roles.

Barnraising

A collective action of a community.

Supervisor Commitment : Impact on Performance

A study found that commitment to supervisors was more strongly related to performance than was commitment to organizations.

Big Five - Team Performance

A study found that the higher the average scores of team members on the traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and emotional stability, the better their teams performed.

Characteristics of Perceiver and Perceived

A summary of classic research findings on some specific characteristics of the perceiver and the perceived reveals a profile of the perceiver as follows: 1. Knowing oneself makes it easier to see others accurately. 2. One's own characteristics affect the characteristics one is likely to see in others. 3. People who accept themselves are more likely to be able to see favorable aspects of other people. 4. Accuracy in perceiving others is not a single skill. These characteristics of the perceiver and the perceived suggest the complexity of social perception. Organizational participants must realize that their perceptions of another person are greatly influenced by their own characteristics and the characteristics of the other person.

The Perception Process

A unique interpretation of a situation, not an exact recording of it. In short, perception is a very complex cognitive process that yields a unique picture of the world, a picture that may be quite different from reality. Applied to organizational behavior, an employee's perception can be thought of as a filter.

Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers

About 20 years after Jung developed his theoretical types, in the 1940s the mother-daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers developed about a 100-item personality test asking participants how they usually feel or act in particular situations in order to measure the preferences on the four pairs of traits yielding 16 distinct types. Called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or simply MBTI, the questions relate to how people prefer to focus their energies (extraversion vs. introversion); give attention and collect information (sensing vs. intuiting); process and evaluate information and make decisions (thinking vs. feeling); and orient themselves to the outside world (judging vs. perceiving).

Organizational Commitment - Affective Commitment

Affective commitment involves the employee's emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization.

Organizational Commitment

Although job satisfaction has received the most attention of all work-related attitudes, organizational commitment has become increasingly recognized in the organizational behavior literature. A strong relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment has been found over the years. On balance, research studies and the field of organizational behavior in general treat satisfaction and commitment as different attitudes. In light of the new environment that includes downsizing, telecommuting, mergers and acquisitions, globalization, and diversity, organizational commitment has resurfaced as a very important topic of study and concern.

Satisfaction and Performance

Although most people assume a positive relationship, the research to date has been mixed. Perhaps the best conclusion about satisfaction and performance is that there is definitely a positive relationship, but probably not as great as conventional wisdom assumed concerning happy workers as productive workers. About 25 years ago, the studies assessed by a meta-analysis indicated a weak (.17 best-estimate correlation) relationship between satisfaction and performance.122 However, conceptual, methodological, empirical, and practical analyses have questioned and argued against these weak results. So, more recently a sophisticated meta-analysis conducted by Tim Judge and his colleagues on 312 samples with a combined N of 54,417 found the mean true correlation to be .30. This latest analysis thus shows a much stronger relationship between employee job satisfaction and performance, but still not greater than the Big Five personality trait of conscientiousness nor as great as the meta-analytic findings of other psychological constructs such as the relationship between self-efficacy (covered in Chapter 7) and performance (.38). Low job satisfaction tends to both turnover and absenteeism, whereas high job satisfaction often results in fewer on-the-job accidents and work grievances, less time needed to learn new job-related tasks, and less stress.

How valid is the MBTI?

Although the MBTI has shown to have reliability and validity as a measure of identifying Jung's personality types and predicting occupational choice (e.g., those high on intuition tend to prefer careers in advertising, the arts, and teaching), there still is not enough research support to base selection decisions or predict job performance. Whereas the Big Five has recently emerged from considerable basic research and has generally been demonstrated to significantly relate to job performance, the MBTI is based on a very old theory, has mixed at best research support, but is widely used and very popular in real-world career counseling, team building, conflict management, and analyzing management styles.

Twin Studies Findings

Although the nature versus nurture debate continues, the findings of twin studies point out the importance that heredity may play in personality, and recent breakthroughs in neuropsychology indicate the importance of the brain in personality have led most psychologists to recognize nature and nurture. "Nurture" primarily continues to dominate.

Absenteeism : Big Five

An absenteeism study found that conscientiousness had a desirable inverse relationship: but, undesirably, the higher the extraversion trait, the more absent the employee tended to be.

Management Styles (Big Five)

Another study found that those with a strategic management style were most characterized by conscientiousness and openness to experience, while those with a strong interpersonal management style were most characterized by extraversion and openness.

Unconscientious Raters

Applied to peer evaluations, as hypothesized, a study found the raters' conscientiousness was negatively related with the level of the rating. In other words, conscientious raters did not give inflated evaluations, but those with low conscientiousness did.

Self-Esteem at Work

As has been noted, "Both research and everyday experience confirm that employees with high self-esteem feel unique, competent, secure, empowered, and connected to the people around them." "If your self-esteem is low and you aren't confident in your thinking ability, you are likely to fear decision making, lack negotiation and interpersonal skills and be reluctant or unable to change." One study found that leaders can overcome such self-esteem problems of their people by practicing procedural fairness and rewarding for a job well done.

The Outcomes of Organizational Commitment

As is the case with job satisfaction, there are mixed outcomes of organizational commitment. Both early and more recent research studies do show support of a positive relationship between organizational commitment and desirable outcomes such as high performance, low turnover, and low absenteeism. There is also evidence that employee commitment relates to other desirable outcomes, such as the perception of a warm, supportive organizational climate and being a good team member willing to help. On balance, however, most researchers would agree that the organizational commitment attitude as defined here may be a better predictor of desirable outcome variables than is job satisfaction and thus deserves management's attention. Yet, as with satisfaction, there are some studies that do not show strong relationships between commitment and outcome variables and others where there are moderating effects between organizational commitment and performance. For example, one study found a stronger relationship between organizational commitment and performance for those with low financial needs than for those with high ones, and another study found that the more tenure the employees had on the job and with the employing organization, the less impact their commitment had on performance.

Studies surrounding OCDs

As with job satisfaction and organizational commitment, there is still some criticism of the conceptualization and research on OCBs, and more research is certainly warranted. One study found that OCBs do influence organizational outcomes rather than the other way around, and another study has begun to analyze the influence of gender on the performance of OCBs. Also, although the research has focused on the positive impact of OCBs, a recent study found that at least too much of the individual initiative portion of OCB is related to higher levels of employee role overload, job stress, and work-family conflict.

Why can't scholars agree on a definition of personality?

Because they operate from different theoretical bases.

Emotional Stability - The Big Five Personality Traits

Calm, secure, happy, unworried.

Maturation

Changes that result from heredity and physical development.

Which Big Five trait has the strongest positive correlation with job performance?

Conscientiousness; This is one area of personality where there is enough research evidence to conclude that conscientiousness should be given attention in understanding the impact that personality traits can have on job performance, job satisfaction, and work motivation, and pragmatically for personnel selection for most jobs.

Organizational Commitment - Continuance Commitment

Continuance commitment involves commitment based on the costs that the employee associates with leaving the organization. This may be because of the loss of senority for promotion or benefits.

Agreeableness - The Big Five Personality Traits

Cooperative, warm, caring, good-natured, courteous, trusting.

Openness to Experience - The Big Five Personality Traits

Curious, intellectual, creative, cultured, artistically sensitive, flexible, imaginative.

Organization-Based Self-Esteem (OBSE)

Defined as the "self-perceived value that individuals have of themselves as organization members acting within an organization context." Those who score high on OBSE view themselves positively, and a meta-analysis found a significant positive relationship with performance and satisfaction on the job. o Self-esteem has obvious implications of OB. Considered a global concept, there are attempts to specifically apply it to the organizational domain.

Conscientiousness - The Big Five Personality Traits

Dependable, hardworking, organized, self-disciplined, persistent, responsible.

Social Perception

Directly concerned with how one individual perceives other individuals: how we get to know others.

Nature and Nurture

It appears that hundreds of genes do at least slightly influence the personality traits, but so does the environment. The debate should not be nature or nurture, but nature and nurture that contributes to one's personality. However, the genes also affect brain functions that in turn affect how people interact with their environment and thus their personalities.

Self-Esteem

Has to do with people's self-perceived competence and self-image. Applied to the analysis of personality, the research results have been mixed, and there is growing controversy about the assumed value of self-esteem. Self-esteem is more of a global, relatively fixed trait, whereas other self-variables, such as self-efficacy, are more situation and context specific. For example, one study found that people with high self-esteem handle failure better than those with low self-esteem. However, an earlier study found that those with high self-esteem tended to become egotistical when faced with pressure situations and may result in aggressive and even violent behavior when threatened.

Satisfaction and Turnover

High job satisfaction will not, in and of itself, keep turnover low, but it does seem to help. On the other hand, if there is considerable job dissatisfaction, there is likely to be high turnover.

Personality (Text Meaning)

How people affect others and how they understand and view themselves, as well as their pattern of inner and outer measurable traits and the person-situation interaction. Personality is very diverse and complex. It incorporates almost everything covered in this text, and more. As defined, personality is the whole person and is concerned with external appearance and traits, self, and situational interactions. How people affect others depends primarily on their external appearance (height, weight, facial features, color, and other physical aspects) and traits. Of more importance to the physiological/biological approach in the study of personality than the external appearance is the role of heredity and the brain.

Misuses of the MBTI

However, like any psychological measure, the MBTI can also be misused. As one comprehensive analysis concluded, "Some inappropriate uses include labeling one another, providing a convenient excuse that they simply can't work with someone else, and avoiding responsibility for their own personal development with respect to working with others and becoming more flexible. One's type is not an excuse for inappropriate behavior."

Antecedents/Factors related to OCDs

Job attitudes that account for loyalty OCBs, Personality that accounts for service delivery OCBs, Effects of nationality on the role of OCBs, The amount of control people have over their job relates to OCBs, Customer knowledge and personality that jointly predict participation in OCBs, Relationship quality and relationship context as antecedents of person- and task-focused interpersonal citizenship behavior.

Person-Situation Interaction

In particular, this dimension suggests that people are not static, acting the same in all situations, but instead are ever changing and flexible. For example, employees can change depending on the particular situation they are in interaction with. Each situation, of course, is different. The differences may seem to be very small on the surface, but when filtered by the person's cognitive mediating processes such as perception (covered next), they can lead to quite large subjective differences and diverse behavioral outcomes. Specifically, there is evidence that the employee's personality will influence interpersonal behavior and the perception and the outcomes of organizational support.

Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs)

Individual, voluntary behavior, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, but that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization. Prosocial, organizational citizenship behaviors of employees. The personality foundation for these OCBs reflects the employee's predispositional traits to be cooperative, helpful, caring, and conscientious. The attitudinal foundation indicates that employees engage in OCBs in order to reciprocate the actions of their organizations. There is evidence that individuals who exhibit OCBs do perform better and receive higher performance evaluations. Also, OCBs do relate to group and organization performance and effectiveness.

Influences on Job Satisfaction : Promotions

Individuals who are promoted on the basis of seniority often experience job satisfaction but not as much as those who are promoted on the basis of performance. Additionally, a promotion with a 10 percent salary raise is typically not as satisfying as one with a 20 percent salary raise. These differences help explain why executive promotions may be more satisfying than promotions that occur at the lower levels of organizations. Also, in recent years with the flattening of organizations and accompanying empowerment strategies, promotion in the traditional sense of climbing the hierarchical corporate ladder of success is no longer available as it once was. Employees operating in the new paradigm, as outlined in Part One of this text, know that not only are traditional promotions not available, but as was pointed out earlier, they may not even be desired.

Negative Affinity (NA)

NA reflects a personality disposition to experience negative emotional states; those with high NA tend to feel nervous, tense, anxious, worried, upset, and distressed. Accordingly, those with high NA are more likely to experience negative affective states—they are more likely to have a negative attitude toward themselves, others, and the world around them. There is accumulating research supporting this biasing effect of NA. For example, one study found that employees high in negative affectivity more often perceived themselves as victims and thus open themselves up to be more likely targets of coworkers' aggressive actions. Another study found NA moderated the link between favorable performance appraisal feedback and job attitudes. One's mood or affective disposition may become a self-fulfilling prophecy as far as organization outcomes are concerned.

The Basic Motivation Process

Needs ---> Drives ---> Incentives.

Organizational Commitment - Normative Commitment

Normative commitment involves employees' feelings of obligation to stay with the organization because they should; it is the right thing to do.

The Meaning of Organizational Commitment

Organizational commitment is most often defined as: (1) A strong desire to remain a member of a particular organization. (2) A willingness to exert high levels of effort on behalf of the organization. (3) A definite belief in, and acceptance of, the values and goals of the organization. In other words, this is an attitude reflecting employees' loyalty to their organization and is an ongoing process through which organizational participants express their concern for the organization and its continued success and well-being. Closely related to job satisfaction is the organizational commitment attitude. It traditionally refers to the employees' loyalty to the organization and is determined by a number of personal, organizational, and nonorganizational variables. Recent research has found that an employee's career commitment is a moderator between the perceptions of company policies and practices and organizational commitment.

Goal Orientation

Originally conceptualized by Carol Dweck through her research on children. She found a dispositional personality dimension related to pursuing goals in achievement situations that could be characterized as (1) learning goal orientation (those who want to develop competence by mastering challenging situations). (2) performance goal orientation (those who want to demonstrate and validate competence by seeking favorable judgments).

Neuroscience at the Workplace

Other examples include neuroscientific explanations for why employees resist change (i.e., change taps fear receptors in the brain and taxes the brain's cognitive capacity to learn new ways of doing things13) and research evidence that leaders with high levels of psychological capital (i.e., confidence, hope, optimism, and resiliency, covered in Chapter 7) have different brain activity on a vision task exercise than do those with low psychological capital.

Self-Concept (Personality Theory)

People's attempts to understand themselves.

Perception vs. Sensation

Perception is more complex and much broader than sensation. The perceptual process or filter can be defined as a complicated interaction of selection, organization, and interpretation. Although perception depends largely on the senses for raw data, the cognitive process filters, modifies, or completely changes these data. The perceptual process adds to, and subtracts from, the "real" sensory world.

What factors determine organizational commitment attitudes?

Personal (age, tenure in the organization, career adaptability, and dispositions such as positive or negative affectivity, or internal or external control attributions) Organizational (the job design, values, support, procedural fairness, and the leadership style of one's supervisor) variables. Nonorganizational, such as the availability of alternatives after making the initial choice to join an organization, will affect subsequent commitment.

Cognitively oriented variables in the study of organizational behavior

Personality, perception, and attitudes represent important micro cognitively oriented variables in the study of organizational behavior. Personality represents the "whole person" concept. It includes perception, learning, motivation, and more.

The Halo Effect

Preceiving a person positively based upon a single trait they possess. Different from stereotyping, which is a tendency to place someone in a single category. Whereas in stereotyping the person is perceived according to a single category, under the halo effect the person is perceived on the basis of one trait. Halo is often discussed in performance appraisal when a rater makes an error in judging a person's total personality and/or performance on the basis of a single positive trait such as intelligence, appearance, dependability, or cooperativeness. The halo effect problem has been given considerable attention in research on performance appraisal. For example, a comprehensive review of the performance appraisal literature found that halo effect was the dependent variable in over a third of the studies and was found to be a major problem affecting appraisal accuracy. Whatever the single trait is, it may override all other traits in forming the perception of the person. For example, a person's physical appearance or dress may override all other characteristics in making a selection decision or in appraising the person's performance.

Conscientious Employees

Put in relation to other organizational behavior areas as a personality trait per se, conscientious employees set higher goals for themselves, have higher performance expectations, and respond well to job enrichment (take on more responsibility, covered in Chapter 6) and empowerment strategies of human resource management. Research indicates that those who are conscientious are less likely to be absent from work, and a study found in international human resource management that conscientiousness of expatriates related positively to the rating of their foreign assignment performance. Yet, there are also recent studies with nonsupporting and mixed results pointing to the complexity of this personality trait.

Influences on Job Satisfaction : The Work Itself

Research has found that such job characteristics and job complexity mediate the relationship between personality and job satisfaction, and if the creative requirements of employees' jobs are met, then they tend to be satisfied. At a more pragmatic level, some of the most important ingredients of a satisfying job uncovered by surveys over the years include interesting and challenging work, and one survey found that career development (not necessarily promotion) was most important to both younger and older employees. A study found work satisfaction is associated with equal opportunities and family-friendly and anti-harassment practices.

Satisfaction and Absenteeism

Research has only demonstrated a weak negative relationship between satisfaction and absenteeism. There are moderating variables such as the degree to which people feel that their jobs are important. For example, research among state government employees has found that those who believed that their work was important had lower absenteeism than did those who did not feel this way. Additionally, it is important to remember that although high job satisfaction will not necessarily result in low absenteeism, low job satisfaction is more likely to bring about absenteeism.

Influences on Job Satisfaction : Work Group

Research indicates that groups requiring considerable interdependence among the members to get the job done will have higher satisfaction. A "good" work group or effective team makes the job more enjoyable. However, this factor is not essential to job satisfaction. On the other hand, if the reverse conditions exist—the people are difficult to get along with—this factor may have a negative effect on job satisfaction. Also, cross-cultural research finds that if members are resistant to teams in general and self-managed teams in particular, they will be less satisfied than if they welcome being part of teams.

Extraversion - The Big Five Personality Traits

Sociable, outgoing, talkative, assertive, gregarious.

Influences on Job Satisfaction : Supervision

Supervision is another moderately important source of job satisfaction.For now, however, it can be said that there seem to be two dimensions of supervisory style that affect job satisfaction; employee-centeredness, and participation/influence. American employees generally complain that their supervisors don't do a very good job on these dimensions. There is considerable empirical evidence that one of the major reasons employees give for quitting a company is that their supervisor does not care about them.

Positive Affinity (PA)

Tend to have an overall sense of well-being, to see themselves as pleasurably and effectively engaged, and to experience positive attitudes. Whether PA is the bipolar opposite and independent of NA is still the subject of debate and interpretation of research results. People do not necessarily move between opposite mood states, but can be both happy and unhappy. However, most of the time there are swings in mood, that is, NA to PA or PA to NA. Research finds that PAs tend to perform better, are less absent from work, and are more satisfied, whereas NAs may experience more stress.There is even evidence that teams with a positive affective tone (i.e., the average PA of members is high) are more effective than teams with a negative affective tone. One's mood or affective disposition may become a self-fulfilling prophecy as far as organization outcomes are concerned.

The MBTI Atlas indicates most managers studied were which dimensions?

The MBTI Atlas indicates that most managers studied were indeed ESTJs.

Wall Street Journal Report : Emotional Brain Damage

The Wall Street Journal even reported a study that indicated those with brain damage impairing their ability to experience emotion made better financial decisions than normal players in a simple investment game.12 It seems that the emotional brain damaged (but normal IQ) participants were more willing to take risks that yielded high payoffs and less likely to react emotionally to losses. They finished the game with significantly more money than the other players.

What are the 5 senses?

The physical senses are considered to be vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. As one molecular biologist declares, "The nose doesn't smell—the brain does."In this way, the human being uses the senses to experience color, brightness, shape, loudness, pitch, heat, odor, and taste.

Socialization Process

The continuous impact from the social environment. It is especially relevant to organizational behavior because the process is not confined to early childhood; rather, it takes place throughout one's life. A study found that the socialization tactics that organizations employ can have a positive, long-run impact on the adjustment of newcomers (i.e., lower role conflict and ambiguity, less stress, and higher job satisfaction and commitment) and related recent research has found that social processes facilitate job search behavior and advancement in management from entry level to upper management.

Work Related Attitudes : PA/NA

The dispositions of positive affectivity (PA) and negative affectivity (NA) have been found to be important antecedents to attitudes about one's job.

What is there general agreement about regarding portions of the brain?

The frontal lobes are the part of the brain that anticipates events and weighs the consequences of behavior, while deeper brain regions, including the seahorse-shaped hippocampus and the nearby amygdala, are associated with such things as memory, mood and motivation. Besides the left and right regions, fMRIs are also able to detect that the amygdala part of the brain has to do with the emotion of the individual. Although there is a very complicated interaction between emotions and thinking, personality and/or behavior, there is enough evidence for some to conclude the following implications for the workplace: Recent discoveries in neuroscience reveal that talent and better-quality performance involve not just the frontal lobes—the decision-making brain circuitry that houses intellect— but also the amygdala.... In tough economic times, talent and emotional engagement are the only natural competitive advantages.

Subprocesses of Perception

The stimulus or environmental situation is the first part; registration, interpretation, and feedback occur within the cognitive processes of the person; then there is the resulting behavior itself; and the environmental consequences of this behavior make up the final part. 1. Situation/Stimulus. 2. Feedback/Interpretation. 3. Resulting Behavior. 4. Environmental Consequences. First important subprocess is the stimulus or situation that is present. Perception begins when a person is confronted with a stimulus or a situation. This confrontation may be with the immediate sensual stimulation or with the total physical and sociocultural environment. In addition to the situation-person interaction, there are the internal cognitive processes of registration, interpretation, and feedback. During the registration phenomenon, the physiological (sensory and neural) mechanisms are affected. Interpretation is the most significant cognitive aspect of perception. The other psychological processes will affect the interpretation of a situation.

The Horns Effect

The tendency to form an overall negative impression of a person on the basis of one negative characteristic. The opposite of the "Halo Effect" is sometimes called the "horns effect" where an individual is downgraded because of a single negative characteristic or incident.

Stereotyping

The tendency to perceive another person (hence social perception) as belonging to a single class or category. The word itself is derived from the typographer's word for a printing plate made from previously composed type. In 1922, Walter Lippmann applied the word to perception. Since then, stereotyping has become a frequently used term to describe perceptual errors. In particular, it is employed in analyzing prejudice. Not commonly acknowledged is the fact that stereotyping may attribute favorable or unfavorable traits to the person being perceived.

Freud's psychoanalytic or psychodynamic theory

The unconscious determinants of behavior.

Examples of firms which use the MBTI

The use of MBTI by numerous firms such as AT&T, Exxon, and Honeywell for their management development programs and Hewlett-Packard for team building seems justified.

3 Component Model of Organizational Commitment (Meyer & Allen)

There is considerable research support for this three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment. It also generally holds up across cultures. 1. Affective commitment involves the employee's emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization. 2. Continuance commitment involves commitment based on the costs that the employee associates with leaving the organization. This may be because of the loss of senority for promotion or benefits. 3. Normative commitment involves employees' feelings of obligation to stay with the organization because they should; it is the right thing to do.

The Big Five Personality Traits (Five-Factor Model - FFM)

These traits have held up as accounting for personality in many analyses over the years and even across cultures.

Social Evolution

This suggests that humanity is evolving along the lines of social phenomena such as trust, collaboration, and competition. Trust, though, allows the unrelated to collaborate, by keeping score of who does what when, and punishing cheats.... The human mind, however, seems to have evolved the trick of being able to identify a large number of individuals and to keep score of relations with them." Very few animals (bats being one of the exceptions) have been able to evolve to this type of collaboration and competition.

High Openess (Big Five) : Job Training/Training Simulation

Those open to experience tend to have job training proficiency and make better decisions in a training problem solving simulation.

Neuropsychologists

Those that explain psychological characteristics primarily through the brain.

Evolutionary Psychologists

Those that suggest humans evolve and retain not only physically over the ages, but also psychologically. Evolutionary psychologists are suggesting that humans may be "hardwired" from distant previous generations. There is also a position being taken on what is called social evolution. This suggests that humanity is evolving along the lines of social phenomena such as trust, collaboration, and competition.

High Agreeableness (Big Five) : Customer Relations & Conflict

Those with high agreeableness tend to handle customer relations and conflict more effectively.

High Extraversion (Big Five) : Management and Sales

Those with high emotional stability tend to be more effective in stressful situations.

Outcomes of Job Satisfaction

To society as a whole as well as from an individual employee's standpoint, job satisfaction in and of itself is a desirable outcome. However, from a pragmatic managerial and organizational effectiveness perspective, it is important to know how, if at all, satisfaction relates to desired outcome variables.

Influences on Job Satisfaction : Pay

Wages and salaries are recognized to be a significant but cognitively complex and multidimensional factor in job satisfaction. Money not only helps people attain their basic needs but is also instrumental in providing upper-level need satisfaction. Employees often see pay as a reflection of how management views their contribution to the organization. Fringe benefits are also important, but they are not as influential. One reason undoubtedly is that most employees do not even know how much they are receiving in benefits. Moreover, most tend to undervalue these benefits because they do not realize their significant monetary value. However, research indicates that if employees are allowed some flexibility in choosing the type of benefits they prefer within a total package, called a flexible or cafeteria benefits plan, there is a significant increase in both benefits satisfaction and overall job satisfaction.

Influences on Job Satisfaction : Working Conditions

Working conditions have a modest effect on job satisfaction. If the working conditions are good (clean, attractive surroundings, for instance), the personnel will find it easier to carry out their jobs. If the working conditions are poor (hot, noisy surroundings, for example), personnel will find it more difficult to get things done. Effect of working conditions on job satisfaction is similar to that of the work group. If things are good, there may or may not be a job satisfaction problem; if things are poor, there very likely will be. Most people do not give working conditions a great deal of thought unless they are extremely bad. Additionally, when there are complaints about working conditions, these sometimes are really nothing more than manifestations of other problems. However, in recent years, because of the increased diversity of the workforce, working conditions have taken on new importance.