PART IV: Leading

Chapter 8
8
Foundations of Individual and
Group Behavior

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 Learning Outcomes
After reading this chapter, I will be able to:
1. Define the focus and goals of organizational
behavior.
2. Identify and describe the three components of
attitudes.
3. Explain cognitive dissonance.
4. Describe the Myers-Briggs personality type
framework and its use in organizations.
5. Define perception and describe the factors that can
shape or distort perception.

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 Learning Outcomes (cont’d)
After reading this chapter, I will be able to:
6. Explain how managers can shape employee
behavior.
7. Contrast formal and informal groups.
8. Explain why people join groups.
9. State how roles and norms influence employees’
behavior.
10. Describe how group size affects group behavior.

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 Organizational Behavior (OB) Defined
• The study of the actions of people at work
• The focus of OB
 Individual behaviors
 Personality, perception, learning, and motivation
 Group behaviors
 Norms, roles, team-and conflict
• The goals of OB
 To explain
 To predict behavior

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 The Organization as an Iceberg Metaphor

Exhibit 8.1

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 Behaviors of Interest to OB
• Employee productivity
 The efficiency and effectiveness of employees
• Absenteeism
 The election by employees to attend work
• Turnover
 The exit of an employee from an organization
• Organizational citizenship
 Employee behaviors that promote the welfare of the
organization

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 Understanding Employees
• Attitudes
 Valuative statements concerning objects, people, or
events
 Cognitive component
– The beliefs, opinions, knowledge, and information held by
a person
 Affective component
– The emotional, or feeling, segment of an attitude
 Behavioral component
– An intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or
something

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 Job-Related Attitudes
• Job satisfaction
 An employee’s general attitude toward his or her job.
• Job involvement
 The degree to which an employee identifies with his
or her job, actively participates in it, and considers his
or her job performance important for self-worth.
• Organizational commitment
 An employee’s orientation toward the organization in
terms of his or her loyalty to, identification with, and
involvement in the organization.

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 Cognitive Dissonance Theory
• Cognitive dissonance
 Any incompatibility between two or more attitudes or
between behavior and attitudes
 Inconsistency is uncomfortable and individuals will seek
a stable state with a minimum of dissonance.
 The desire to reduce dissonance is determined by:
– The importance of the elements creating the dissonance
– The degree of influence the individual believes he or she
has over the elements
– The rewards that may be involved.

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 Fostering Positive Job Attitudes
• Managers can reduce dissonance by:
 Creating the perception that the source of the
dissonance is externally imposed and uncontrollable.
 Increasing employee rewards for engaging in the
behaviors related to the dissonance.
• Satisfied workers are not necessarily more
productive workers.
 Assisting employees in successful performance of
their jobs will increase their desired outcomes and
lead to increased job satisfaction—focusing on
productivity as a means rather than an ends.

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 Personality and Behavior
• Personality is the combination of the
psychological traits that characterize that
person.
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
 A method of identifying personality types uses four
dimensions of personality to identify 16 different
personality types.
• Big Five model
 Five-factor model of personality that includes
extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness,
emotional stability, and openness to experience.
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 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• Extroversion versus introversion (EI)
 An individual’s orientation toward the inner world of
ideas (I) or the external world of the environment
(E).
• Sensing versus intuitive (SN)
 An individual’s reliance on information gathered from
the external world (S) or from the world of ideas (N).

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 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
(cont’d)
• Thinking versus feeling (TF)
 One’s preference for evaluating information in an
analytical manner (T) or on the basis of values and
beliefs (F).
• Judging versus perceiving (JP).
 Reflects an attitude toward the external world that is
either task completion oriented (J) or information
seeking (P).

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 Characteristics Frequently Associated with Myers-Briggs Types

Source: Modified and reproduced by special permission of the publisher. Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc., Palo Alto, CA 94303, from
Introduction to Type, 6th ed., by Isabel Myers-Briggs, and Katherine C. Briggs. Copyright 1998 by Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc. All
rights reserved. Further reproduction is prohibited without publisher’s written consent. Introduction to Type is a trademark of Consulting Exhibit 8.2
Psychologists Press, Inc. (The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and MBTI are registered trademarks of Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc.)
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 Big Five Model of Personality Factors
• Extroversion
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Emotional stability
• Openness to experience

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 The Big Five Model of Personality
Extroversion A personality dimension that describes the degree to
which someone is sociable, talkative, and assertive.

Agreeableness A personality dimension that describes the degree to

which someone is good-natured, cooperative, and
trusting.

Conscientiousness A personality dimension that describes the degree to

which someone is responsible, dependable,
persistent, and achievement oriented.

Emotional stability A personality dimension that describes the degree to

which someone is calm, enthusiastic, and secure
(positive) or tense, nervous, depressed, and insecure
(negative).

Openness to experience A personality dimension that describes the degree to

which someone is imaginative, artistically sensitive,
and intellectual.

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 Emotional intelligence (EI)
• An assortment of noncognitive skills,
capabilities, and competencies that influence a
person’s ability to cope with environmental
demands and pressures.
 Dimensions of EI
 Self-awareness own feelings
 Self-management of own emotions
 Self-motivation in face of setbacks
 Empathy for others’ feelings
 Social skills to handle others’ emotions
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 Personality Traits And Work-related
Behaviors
• Locus of control
 A personality attribute that measures the degree to
which people believe that they are masters of their
own fate.
• Machiavellianism (“Mach”)
 A measure of the degree to which people are
pragmatic, maintain emotional distance, and believe
that ends can justify means.

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 Personality Traits And Work-related
Behaviors (cont’d)
• Self-esteem (SE)
 An individual’s degree of life dislike for him- or herself
• Self-monitoring
 A measure of an individual’s ability to adjust his or
her behavior to external, situational factors
• Propensity for risk taking
 The willingness to take chances—a preference to
assume or avoid risk

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 Matching Personalities And Jobs

Performanc
Person e Job

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 Holland’s Typology of Personality
and Sample Occupations
• Realistic • Conventional
 Prefers physical activities  Prefers rule-regulated,
that require skill, strength, orderly and unambiguous
and coordination activities
• Investigative • Enterprising
 Prefers activities involving  Prefers verbal activities
thinking, organizing, and where there are
understanding opportunities to influence
• Social others and attain power
 Prefers activities that • Artistic
involve helping and  Prefers ambiguous and
developing others unsystematic activities that
Source: Reproduced by special permission of the publisher, Psychological Assessment
allow creative expression
Resources, Inc., Making Vocational Choices, 3rd ed., copyright 1973, 1985, 1992, 1997 Exhibit 8.3
by Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. All rights reserved.
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 Relationship Among Occupational Personality Types

Source: Reproduced by special permission of the publisher, Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc., Making Vocational Exhibit 8.4
Choices, 3rd ed., copyright 1973, 1985, 1992, 1997 by Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. All rights reserved.
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 Key Points of Holland’s Model
• There do appear to be intrinsic differences in
personality among individuals.
• There are different types of jobs.
• People in job environments congruent with their
personality types should be more satisfied and
less likely to resign voluntarily than people in
incongruent jobs.

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 Personality Characteristics of
Entrepreneurs
• Proactive personality
 High level of motivation
 Internal
locus of control
 Need for autonomy

 Abundance of self-confidence
 Self-esteem

 High energy levels

 Persistence

 Moderate risk taker

 Problem solver
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 Perception

•“L ke y ur b ain, the n w L nd Rov r

autom tic lly adj sts to anyth ng.”

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 Perception
• Perception
 A process by which individuals organize and interpret
their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to
their environment.
 One manager may evaluate an employee differently
from the other. We interpret what we see and call it
reality.

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 What influence Perception ?
• A number of factors operate to shape and
sometimes distort the perception.
• 1. the perceiver
• 2. the object or target being perceived
• 3. the context of the situation in which the
perception is made.

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 Influences on Perception
• Personal • Target
characteristics characteristics
 Attitudes  Relationship of a target
 Personality to its background
 Motives  Closeness and/or
 Interests similarity to other
things
 Past experiences
 The context in objects
 Expectations is seen
 Other situational
factors.

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 Perceptual Challenges:
What Do You See?

Exhibit 8.5

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 How Managers Judge Employees
• Attribution theory
 A theory based on the premise that we judge people
differently depending on the meaning we attribute to
a given behavior
 Internally caused behavior is believed to be under the
control of the individual.
 Externally caused behavior results from outside causes;
that is, the person is seen as having been forced into
the behavior by the situation.

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 Interpreting Behavior
• Distinctiveness
 Whether an individual displays a behavior in many situations or
whether it is particular to one situation.
If behavior is unusual, its due to some external factors, on the
other hand, if its not unique, then its internal.
• Consensus
 If the individual responds in the same way as everyone else
faced with a similar situation responds.
High consistency means that issue is external, otherwise internal
• Consistency
 The individual engages in the same behaviors regularly and
consistently over time.

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 The Process of Attribution Theory

Exhibit 8.6

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 Judgment Errors
• Fundamental attribution error
 The tendency to underestimate the influence of
external factors and overestimate the influence of
internal or personal factors when making judgments
about the behavior of others.
• Self-serving bias
 The tendency for individuals to attribute their own
successes to internal factors while putting the blame
for failures on external factors.

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 Distortions in Shortcut Methods
in Judging Others

Selective Perception
Assumed similarity
Stereotyping
Halo effect
Self-fulfilling prophecy

Exhibit 8.7

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 Learning
• Learning defined
 Any relatively permanent change in behavior that
occurs as a result of experience.
• Operant conditioning (B. F. Skinner)
 A behavioral theory that argues that voluntary, or
learned, behavior is a function of its consequences.
 People learn to behave to get something they want or
to avoid something they don’t want.
 Voluntary and learned behavior vs. reflexive and
unlearned behavior.

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 Learning
 Reinforcement increases the likelihood that behavior
will be repeated; behavior that is not rewarded or is
punished is less likely to be repeated.
 Lack of reinforcement – weakens a behavior and
lessens the likelihood it will be repeated.
 Rewards are most effective if they immediately follow
the desired response.

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 Learning (cont’d)
• Social learning theory
 The theory that people can learn through observation
and direct experience; by modeling the behavior of
others.
• Modeling processes
 Attentional processes.
 Retention processes
 Motor reproduction processes
 Reinforcement processes

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 Shaping Behavior
• Shaping behavior
 Systematically reinforcing each successive step that
moves an individual closer to a desired behavior
• Four ways in which to shape behavior:
 Positive reinforcement
 Negative reinforcement
 Punishment
 Extinction.

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 Foundations Of Group Behavior
• Group
 Two or more interacting and interdependent
individuals who come together to achieve particular
objectives
• Role
 A set of expected behavior patterns attributed to
someone in a given position in a social unit
• Norms
 Acceptable standards (e.g., effort and performance,
dress, and loyalty) shared and enforced by the
members of a group
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 Foundations Of Group Behavior (cont’d)
• Status
 A prestige grading, position, or rank within a group
 May be informally conferred by characteristics such as
education, age, skill, or experience.
 Anything can have status value if others in the group
admire it.

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 Reasons Why People Join Groups

Security
Status
Self-esteem
Affiliation
Power
Goal achievement

Exhibit 8.8

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 Examples of Cards Used in Asch Study

Solomon Asch and Group Conformity:

Does the desire to be accepted as a part of a group leave one susceptible
to conforming to the group’s norms? Will the group exert pressure that is
strong enough to change a member’s attitude and behavior? According to
the research by Solomon Asch, the answer appears to be yes.
Exhibit 8.9

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 Group Effects
• Social loafing
 The tendency of an individual in a group to decrease
his or her effort because responsibility and individual
achievement cannot be measured
• Group cohesiveness
 The degree to which members of a group are
attracted to each other and share goals
 Size, work environment, length of time in existence,
group-organization, and goal congruency affect the
degree of group cohesiveness.

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 The Relationship Between
Group Cohesiveness and Productivity

Exhibit 8.10

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