Attitudes and Behaviour in Organisations Flashcards
How do key work-related attitudes, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, influence workplace behaviors?
Attitudes are crucial indicators of the quality of workplace experiences. They are outcomes of organisational composition and management, reflecting how positive or negative these experiences are. Key work-related attitudes such as job satisfaction and organisational commitment significantly influence behaviours like performance, motivation, collegiality, and citizenship behaviours.
What are the factors of attitudes?
Personal Factors: Individual personality traits, values, and beliefs.
Contextual Factors: Work environment, leadership style, organisational culture, and job characteristics.
What are the consequences of attitudes?
Positive attitudes often lead to better job performance, higher motivation, and greater organisational citizenship behaviours.
Negative attitudes can result in lower productivity, higher absenteeism, and increased turnover.
How do you build positive organisations?
Creating positive organisations involves fostering rewarding environments for individuals and positive social environments for groups.
Encouraging inclusive teams where diversity is valued.
Ensuring that diverse perspectives are integrated into decision-making processes to harness the benefits of diversity.
What is Organisational Behaviour?
A field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behaviour within organisations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organisation’s effectiveness
What are the core components of Organisational Behaviour?
Individuals: Understanding individual behavior, motivation, and differences.
Groups: Examining group dynamics, team performance, and leadership.
Organisations: Analysing organisational structure, culture, and processes.
OB integrates theories from multiple social science disciplines, including psychology, social psychology, sociology, and anthropology, to study these components.
How can managers and business owners effectively control, shape, and modify employee behavior?
Understanding how to control, shape, and modify behaviour is crucial for managers and business owners. Effective behaviour management often involves strategies incorporating reward or encouragement for desired behaviours and reprimand or punishment for undesirable behaviours.
What is classical conditioning?
An unconditioned stimulus is paired with a neutral stimulus. This leads to an automatic, conditioned response. This foundation laid the groundwork for understanding behaviour modification.
What is operant conditioning?
Operant conditioning involves applying four kinds of reinforcement to modify and control behaviour: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment and extinction
What is meant by positive reinforcement?
Encouraging desirable behaviour by providing a reward. For example, monetary rewards, praise, and social recognition can reinforce specific behaviours.
What is meant by negative reinforcement?
Removing an unpleasant element in response to desirable behaviour. For instance, reducing oversight when an employee’s performance improves.
What is meant by punishment?
Applying something unpleasant to decrease undesirable behaviour, such as verbal reprimands or withholding bonuses.
What is meant by extinction?
Removing reinforcements to discourage specific behaviours. This might involve discontinuing recognition for a behaviour that is no longer desired, leading to its decline.
What are the two key additions relevant to behavioral shaping and control?
Social Modeling: People learn by observing others. This means they can anticipate the outcomes of actions based on the observed consequences of others’ behaviours.
Cognition: Individuals are seen as decision-makers whose behaviours are influenced by their perceptions, cognitions, and emotional reactions to environmental stimuli.
Social cognitive personality theory indicates how habitual behaviour results from repeatedly responding to particular situations in the same way, almost rehearsing responses that become increasingly automatic, and eventually habitual.
What is behaviour management?
Behavioural management incorporates the role of actions or interventions by management based on these principles. Behavioural management involves applying principles of reinforcement to control and influence employee behaviour
Contingent Reinforcement: Reinforcements such as money, feedback, and social recognition should be contingent on the exhibition of desired behaviours.
What are the three main reinforcement strategies?
Money: A primary reinforcer attractive to employees but limited in providing informational value about performance.
Feedback: Provides information on performance and behaviour, helping to clarify expectations and improve processes.
Social Recognition: Public praise, awards, or highlighting achievements can recognise effective behaviour or performance.
What are attitudes?
Attitudes are evaluative statements or beliefs about objects, people, or events. They represent how favourably or unfavourably one feels towards a particular target.
What are dispositions?
Inherent qualities or tendencies that influence how a person behaves or responds in certain situations.
What are the three components that attitudes are broken up into?
Cognitive Component: Represents thoughts or beliefs about the target.
Example: Believing “my office space is too small.”
Affective Component: Represents the emotions associated with the attitude.
Example: Feeling frustrated or angry about having a small workspace.
Behavioural Component: Represents the behavioural intentions or consequences resulting from the attitude.
Example: Requesting a different workspace, trying to create more space, or complaining to a manager.
What is the Cognitive dissonance theory?
This theory suggests that people experience discomfort (dissonance) when they hold conflicting cognitions (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, behaviors that are inconsistent). To reduce this discomfort, they are motivated to change one or more of these cognitions.
An employee who values honesty but finds themselves lying to a client may experience dissonance and might either justify the lie, change their behaviour, or align their attitude with the dishonest action.
What are the two main implications for understanding the attitudes-behavior link?
When people are free to behave as they wish, they tend to act consistently with their attitudes to avoid dissonance. The more important the attitude, the more likely they are to behave in accordance with it
In organisations, choices and behaviours are rarely free from constraints. Social pressures, obligations, or incentives might lead people to behave in ways that do not reflect their attitudes.
How can managers promote attitude-behavior consistency and reduce dissonance within organizational constraints?
Behaviour Shape Organisational Constraints: Understanding that behaviour organisation is often influenced by external constraints helps managers anticipate when employees might experience dissonance. Managers can support employees by acknowledging these constraints and providing clear, transparent reasons for required behaviours.
Attitude Modification through Justitic: recognising that people may change their attitudes to justify their behaviours allows managers to structure incentives and justifications in ways that all organisational goals. For example, providing clear and meaningful justifications for difficult decisions can help reduce dissonance among employees and foster a more cohesive work environment.
Promoting Attitude-Behavior Consistency: Encouraging environments where behaviours can align more closely with personal attitudes can reduce dissonance. This might involve involving employees in decision-making processes or providing avenues for feedback and expression of concerns.
What is the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB)?
An individual’s intention to engage in a behaviour is the primary predictor of whether they will actually do so.
If someone plans to perform a specific behavior, that intention is a strong indicator of whether they will follow through and actually do it. The clearer and stronger their intention, the more likely they are to act on it.
What are the three factors of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB)?
Attitude Toward the Behavior: How favourably or unfavourably one feels about performing the behaviour.
Subjective Norms: Perceived social pressure to perform or not perform the behaviour.
Perceived Behavioral Control: The perceived ease or difficulty of performing the behavior, which reflects past experiences and anticipated obstacles.
What are the key implications of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB)?
Formation of Attitudes and Beliefs: Attitudes and beliefs are shaped by individual, external, and contextual variables. Factors such as personality, education, and life experiences contribute to these beliefs, which serve as the foundation for actions and behaviours, regardless of their rationality.
Behavioural Beliefs and Specific Attitudes: Behavioural beliefs lead to attitudes about specific behaviours. For attitudes to predict behaviour, they must be specific and directly related to the behavioural act. For example, the general attitude “I like my job” might not predict staying late to finish an assignment, but the specific attitude “I think it is reasonable to stay late to finish work if required” likely would.
Social Norms and Perceived Control: Beliefs about social norms involve judgments about what is socially acceptable. For instance, while an individual might find staying late unreasonable, this perception could change if their colleagues regularly stay late.
Perceptions of behavioural control concern the extent to which individuals feel capable of performing certain actions. Even if someone believes staying late is reasonable and usual, they might not be able to do so due to other commitments.
Formation of Behavioural Intentions: Attitudes, social norms, and perceived behavioural control form behavioural intentions. Actual behaviour follows from these intentions, moderated by actual behavioural control.
What are the two important work-related attitudes?
Job satisfaction and organizational commitment
What is meant by job satisfaction?
Job satisfaction refers to a person’s overall feelings about their job, encompassing both positive and negative sentiments. Job satisfaction can be broken down into specific aspects, such as satisfaction with pay, supervision, and workload. These specific attitudes collectively contribute to overall job satisfaction.
How do personal judgment and social comparison influence subjectivity in job satisfaction?
Personal Judgement: Job satisfaction is inherently subjective. Individuals are asked to evaluate their satisfaction without comparing their situation to others.
Influence of Social Comparison: Despite its subjective nature, satisfaction is often influenced by social comparisons and perceptions of fairness
What are the antecedents of Job Satisfaction?
Benefits vs. Costs: Job satisfaction is influenced by a psychological evaluation of whether the job’s benefits outweigh its costs (sacrifices, effort, or negative aspects that a worker experiences). Extrinsic benefits, these include tangible rewards like pay and bonuses.
Intrinsic benefits, these include the nature of the work itself, such as whether it is interesting and fulfilling.
Individual Differences: Some individuals are more naturally inclined to view their job positively or negatively. The general disposition to feel positive or negative about things influences job satisfaction
What is the model of job satisfaction?
Job satisfaction is influenced by three main sources:
Job Factors: Personality and dispositions(traits or tendencies that influence a person’s behavior)
Job Characteristics: Nature and features of the job.
Perceptions of Distributive Justice: Fairness in the distribution of resources and rewards
What is meant by organisational commitment?
This refers to the emotional attachment, identification with, and involvement in the organisation. The extent to which an individual feels they have a positive relationship with their organization
What are the three forms of organisational commitment?
Affective Commitment: The emotional attachment that a person feels towards their organization is referred to as affective commitment. People feel attached to their organization when the goals and values of the organization are largely consistent with their own, and when they ‘buy in’ to the mission and philosophy of the organization.
Continuance Commitment: When an individual remains in an organization simply because the costs of leaving (loss of benefits) are too great, they would be described as having high continuance commitment. Lack of viable alternatives. This form of commitment is obviously less desirable to foster among employees.
Normative Commitment: Sometimes an individual may feel dissatisfied with their job, or may think that their organization is moving in the wrong direction, yet still feel obliged to be loyal and committed, and to stay with the organization. Sense of moral obligation. The perceived investment the organisation has made in them.
What are the consequences of job satisfaction and organisational
commitment on job performance?
Ruch, Hershauer, and Wright (1976) describe the issue as the productivity puzzle, describing the ‘paradoxical notion that although some happy workers are productive, there are also many happy workers who are unproductive.
Collectively, evidence indicates that employees with positive job attitudes tend to perform better.
What are the seven potential models?
Satisfaction Causes Performance: Happiness at work leads to better performance.
Performance Causes Satisfaction: High performance leads to rewards, fostering positive job attitudes.
Reciprocal Relationship: Satisfaction and performance influence each other.
Unmeasured Variable: A third variable influences both satisfaction and performance.
No Relationship: There is no direct link between satisfaction and performance.
Moderated Relationship: Variables such as job knowledge, skills, and abilities moderate the relationship.
Reconceptualisation: Job attitudes and performance reflect underlying affectivity, influencing the relationship.
