Business 107 : Organizational Behavior Flashcards
Upward Communication
A method of formal communication that allows subordinate employees to communication with their superiors.
External Communication
A form of organizational communication that takes involves members of an organization communicating with individuals who are not part of the organization.
Barriers to Communication
Different variables that can make it difficult for people to communicate effectively with one another, leading to conversational blocks.
Advising
Individuals using this effective listening technique are able to provide good advice.
Drawbacks to texting in business communication
This form of communication can be too informal, misunderstood and inappropriate.
Probing
Using this effective listening technique allows you to use questions to obtain additional information about the individual you’re speaking to.
Reflecting
This effective listening technique is used to ensure the person you’re speaking with knows that you are paying attention to what they’re saying. This can involve repeating what they’ve said.
Informal Conversation
A type of business communication that isn’t regulated. Sometimes referred to as the grapevine, this can include gossip and rumors.
Problems with social media in business communication
Individuals using this method of communication may find it hard to interact in an appropriate way with the company they work for.
Factual Accuracy in Communication
A factor in effective communication that involves providing information that is true and that can be supported by facts.
Clarity and Concision in Communication
An important facet of communicating effectively. Individuals must ensure their communication can be easily understood.
Horizontal Communication
Individuals use this method of formal communication when they are sharing information with people of the same managerial rank.
Effective Listening Barriers
Competitiveness
Focusing on impressing people
Acting like a know-it-all
Overreacting
Persuasiveness in Communication
The final part of effective communication, this involves holding the attention of the individual you’re speaking to and encouraging them to do what you want.
Status Differences Communication Barrier
This communication barrier occurs when individuals can’t communicate well with people in either supervisory or subordinate roles.
Elements of Effective Communication
(4 Things)
Practicality
Factuality
Concision and clarity
Persuasiveness
Physical Separation Communication Barrier
A type of communication problem created by distance. Individuals may have difficulty finishing their thoughts and working well together.
Internal Communication
This type of organization communication involves the sharing of information between members of the same organization.
Gender-Specific Communication Barrier
Differences in the way that men and women communicate with one another lead to this kind of communication barrier.
Deflecting
An effective listening technique that involves switching conversational topics to allow communication to continue.
Diversity / Sensitivity Employee Training
Working on this type of employee training will improve how employees deal with people from a wide range of backgrounds and circumstances.
Career Withdrawal
The final career stage. Individuals at this stage work to consider how they will end their career.
Career Establishment
This is the 1st stage of an individual’s career. It typically occurs from the ages of 21-26 and involves mastering basic job skills and elements.
Problem Solving Employee Training
You can use this kind of employee training to improve problem solving and decision making skills.
Career Plateau
The point in an individual’s career when they are no longer likely to earn further promotions or move up in the company.
Job Training Methods
Job rotation
Job mentoring
On-the-job training
Interpersonal Skills Employee Training
Employees receiving this type of training will work on their abilities to communicate, solve conflicts, develop relationships and build trust.
Job Mentoring
Using this type of training involves placing an individual with someone who has more experience. It offers one-on-one interaction, but might not work if the pairing doesn’t get along.
Career Advancement
The 2nd stage in the career stage model. Individuals at this stage typically features achievements.
Literacy Employee Training
A type of employee training that focuses on helping individuals develop skills in reading and writing. May be used with other forms of training.
Career Management and Development Systems
Systems that include workshops and counselors for employees. These systems can improve employee morale and lead to business success.
On-the-Job Training
This type of training involves learning as you work. It allows for fast feedback and corrections, but it can impact the trainer and effect the company’s workflow.
Job Rotation
A form of training that involves training employees in different jobs over a period of time. It can decrease boredom and increase employee skills, but may negatively impact employees.
Career Maintenance
Individuals in this stage of their career typically maintain their productivity and reach a career plateau where they work at the same level without advancing.
Technology Employee Training
This form of employee training involves helping employees build skills with computers and other electronic devices.
Phased Retirement
A type of retirement that involves gradually phasing out hours.
Loyalty Response
Employees experiencing this response to job dissatisfaction will stay in their career hoping things will improve.
Attributional Bias
Individuals display this bias when they form assumptions without considering all the necessary information.
Self-Serving Bias Error
A type of bias error that involves people crediting positive outcomes to their own actions while believing negative outcomes are caused by external events
Low Context Culture
Individuals in this type of culture provide lots of specific information when they’re communicating and focus on clearly detailing the issues they’re discussing.
Affective Workplace Attitude
Individuals using this component of attitude focus on their feelings about a particular person or circumstance, such as hate or fear
Aggressive Behavior
A type of deviant workplace behavior that involves hostility or intimidation. This behavior can also include sexual harassment.
Factors that influence perception
Individual experiences // The setting itself // The individual or object being perceived
The Contrast Effect
Individuals use this shortcut when they contrast items or people while trying to work on a comparison decision.
Monochronic Time Culture
These cultures view time as very precise and tend to value staying on task. Germany is one example of this type of culture.
Neglect Response
A job dissatisfaction response that occurs when employees no longer care about their job or the company
Methods for measuring job satisfaction
Surveys // Interviews // Performance monitoring
Job Satisfaction
A term used to describe an individual’s relative contentment in his or her current career; this factor can be tied to job performance, though the exact linkage is not certain
External Attributes
These attributes are related to behaviors influenced by situational causes.
Distinctiveness
An aspect of attribution theory that involves considering the ways people act in various situations
Selective Perception
This shortcut is characterized by only perceiving what you want to see or hear and ignoring the information that doesn’t support what you want to believe.
Unproductive Behavior
This form of deviant workplace behavior occurs when employees behave in ways that waste time, such as spending time away from their work.
Perceiver
This term refers to the individual who notes a situation with his or her senses.
Polychronic Time Culture
Cultures with this view of time typically mix personal time into work time and see them as interconnected.
Stereotyping
A perceptual shortcut in which individuals, based on an aggregrate belief, develop ideas about certain groups of people as a whole
Consistency
This aspect of attribution theory looks at assessing the behavior of individuals when they are faced with the exact same situation multiple times.
Cognitive Workplace Attitude
A component of attitude that encompasses an individual’s thoughts, ideas or beliefs. Generalities can be a form of this kind of attitude.
Internal Attributes
Attributes related to behaviors caused by a person’s thoughts or actions
High Context Culture
A type of culture where people use assumptions while communicating, and count on others to understand what they’re discussing
Attribution Theory
This theory deals with the ways that individuals view events happening around them. This theory has three aspects: consistency, distinctiveness and consensus.
Workplace Attitudes
Cognitive // Affective // Conative or Behavioral
The Halo Effect
A shortcut that involves applying an initial impression of an individual or a situation to other circumstances where it might not actually apply
The Central Tendency
This shortcut occurs when people only consider the average results of a group, instead of looking at individual results.
Perceived
A term used to describe the object, person or situation that is being considered during perception
Fundamental Attribution Error
This form of error occurs when someone determines blame without considering all external factors that impacted the event.
Attitudes
This term is used to describe how people think and relate to the world around them.
Voice Response
A way of responding to job dissatisfaction that involves speaking about changes and trying to bring them about
Exit Response
This response to job dissatisfaction occurs when employees quit to look for different employment.
Behavioral/Conative Workplace Attitude
This component of attitude deals with how individuals want to act toward someone or something.
Abuse of Property
Employees demonstrating this kind of deviant workplace behavior are likely to take advantage of company property in some way. Taking workplace materials is an example of this kind of behavior.
Groups / Teams
An element of human relations that improves employee productivity by increasing socialization.
Technical Skills in Management
Managerial skills that are used when trying to complete a task.
The Hawthorne Experiment
Occurring in 1927, this experiment tested the connection between worker psychology and their production output. It led to the Hawthorne Effect and fueled the human relations movement.
Evidence-Based Management Study
This is the most precise method of organizational behavioral study. It requires controlled observations.
Planning in Management
This managerial function involves coming up with a plan that may need to be specialized to fit the requirements of the company. Typically this function is ongoing.
Human Skills in Management
These skills allow managers to successfully work and communicate with their employees.
The Western Electric (Hawthorne Works) Studies
Conducted from 1923-1933, these studies developed into the factors that affected worker accomplishment and worker support in the face of poor management.
Informational Roles
This role in management deals with finding and sharing information. Monitors, disseminators and spokespeople are examples of this role.
Staffing in Management
This function of management is not always agreed upon. It involves finding the right employees for necessary jobs.
Systematic Study
A form of employee observation that looks at behaviors and tries to find specific evidence.
Advantages of positive organizational scholarship
Increased focus on employee strengths
Creation of an ethical work environment
Positive impact on a company’s organizational structure
Disciplines that shaped organizational behavior
Psychology
Anthropology
Sociology
Medicine
Management
Internal Perspective
This perspective of organizational behavior focuses on considering the feelings and thoughts of employees in order to understand behavior.
Controlling in Management
This is the final managerial function and occurs when managers evaluate the outcome of their plan.
Top-Level Management
This level of management includes senior executives and other individuals who hold a lot of power in the company.
Low-Level Management
Management at this level involves dealing with individual employees and is characterized by interpersonal requirements.
Leading in Management
Managers carry out this function when they communicate, motivate and otherwise positively interact with their subordinates.
Conceptual Skills in Management
Analytical abilities and problem-solving capabilities are involved in this type of managerial skill.
Henry Mintzberg
A man who spent a lot of time studying the behavior of managers. He concluded that managers can act in 10 clear roles that can be sorted into three categories.
Upward Communication
A type of communication that enables employees to contact members of management.
Decisional Roles
Managers in this role will act to make decisions and try to find ways to improve the company. Entrepreneurs, negotiators and resource allocators provide examples of this role.
Good Leadership
Involving good communication and sound decision making, this is an important element of organizational behavior.
The Industrial Revolution
This event greatly increased the number of people working in factories and increased the importance of understanding organizational behavior.
Skills needed by managers
Technical
Human
Conceptual
Intuition Study
This method for studying the behavior of employees relies on gut feelings and common sense and can lead to incorrect observations.
Organizing in Management
A managerial function that requires individuals to delegate work and create a structure to carry out a plan.
External Perspective
An organizational behavior perspective that believes outside events and factors impact employee performance.
Middle-Level Management
Managers at this level can lead departments but still serve under higher level management.
Brainstorming
Groups can use this decision making option to come up with lots of possible solutions. Ideas cannot initially be criticized in this method.
Nominal Group Technique
A form of group decision making where individual come up with ideas using a written process and vote for the eventual solution.
Types of Work Teams
Functional
Cross-Functional
Self-Directed
Work Group
A single leader controls and conducts the activities during this kind of project.
KPI
An acronym that stands for Key Performance Indicators, also referred to as metrics. These indicators can be used when performing qualitative performance assessment.
Delphi Technique
This method of group decision making uses surveys and can be used to come up with several alternative choices.
Tuckman’s Five Stages of Group Development
Forming // Storming // Norming // Performing // Adjourning
Work Teams
All members take part in these projects and sort out work assignments. Leaders are expected to serve as facilitators in this kind of project.
Quantitative Performance Measurement
This method for measuring performance uses data that is focused on known quantities, such as statistics.
Sharing of Information
This benefit of working as a group can lead to informed decisions based on multiple people sharing information.
Groupthink
A disadvantage to group work. This occurs when members of the group all share an opinion or try not to create friction by making new suggestions.
Expectations
Used to describe what an individual believes will occur in a situation.
Maintenance Roles
This group role involves preserving the group’s direction. Examples include gate-keepers, compromisers and standards-setters.
Blocking Roles
These roles focus on stopping group progress if they don’t agree with it. Individuals who are as aggressors or dominators fulfill these roles.
Synergy
A benefit of working in a group. This allows people to come up with many creative ideas quickly,
Qualitative Performance Measurement
A way to measure performance that considers different qualities or descriptive terms.
Group Role
This term refers to the action or part an individual carries out in a given situation.
Task Roles
Individuals in these roles must carry out some kind of action, though this may be intangible. Opinion-seekers, opinion-givers, recorders and procedural technicians are examples of this role.
High Machs
Individuals are highly manipulative, difficult to persuade, excel in face-to-face settings and exhibit a high degree of Machiavellianism. This type of individual would likely do well in commission-based sales.
Anchoring bias
A form of information-type bias in decision making. It involves relying too heavily on a single piece of information when making a decision.
Type B personality
A person with this personality type exhibits relaxed, laid back, unstressed, and flexible tendencies.
Emotional contagion
A way that emotions in one employee are transferred to another employee nonverbally
The Vroom-Yetton Leader Model
A model which posits five forms of leadership decision making. These include autocratic decision I (decide), autocratic decision II (consult individually), consult group, facilitate, and delegate styles.
Self-monitoring
The ability to shift one’s behavior based on the actions or cues of others
Emotional dissonance
A negative feeling a person gets when he or she views an emotion as potentially conflicting with his or her identity
Four styles of decision making
These include conceptual, directive, behavioral, and analytical styles.
Scales of the MBTI
Include the following four areas: extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving
Conceptual decision making
A decision-making style that emphasizes long-term results. An individual with this style likes to address problems creatively and brainstorm options and is also open to taking risks.
Steps of the rational decision-making model
In order, these include defining a problem, identifying decision criteria, allocating weights to the criteria, developing alternatives, evaluating alternatives, and choosing the best alternative.
The Big Five Personality Model
Five sectors of observable personality traits, represented by the acronym ‘O.C.E.A.N.’ They include openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Type A personality
A person with this personality type exhibits aggressive, ambitious, work-intensive, controlling, highly competitive, and impatient tendencies.