Lesson 4 Flashcards
Emotions
Physiological, behavioural, and psychological episodes experienced towards an object, person, or event that create a state of readiness.
Attitudes
The cluster of beliefs, assessed feelings, and behavioural intentions towards a person, object, or event (called an attitude object).
Cognitive dissonance
An emotional experience caused by a perception that our beliefs, feelings, and behaviour are incongruent with each other.
Emotional labour
The effort, planning, and control needed to express organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions.
Emotional dissonance
The psychological tension experienced when the emotions people are required to display are quite different from the emotions they actually experience at that moment.
Emotional intelligence (EI)
A set of abilities to perceive and express emotion, assimilate emotion in thought, understand and reason with emotion, and regulate emotion in oneself and others.
Emotional intelligence includes four main dimensions
Awareness of our own emotions
Management of our own emotions
Awareness of others’ emotions
Management of others’ emotions
Awareness of our own emotions
This is the ability to perceive and understand the meaning of your own emotions. You are more sensitive to subtle emotional responses to events and understand their message. Self-aware people are better able to eavesdrop on their emotional responses to specific situations and to use this awareness as conscious information.
Management of our own emotions
Emotional intelligence includes the ability to manage your own emotions, something that we all do to some extent. We keep disruptive impulses in check. We try not to feel angry or frustrated when events go against us. We try to feel and express joy and happiness towards others when the occasion calls for these emotional displays. We try to create a second wind of motivation later in the workday. Notice that management of your own emotions goes beyond displaying behaviours that represent desired emotions in a particular situation. It includes generating or suppressing emotions. In other words, the deep acting described earlier requires high levels of the self-regulation component of emotional intelligence.
Awareness of others’ emotions
This dimension refers to the ability to perceive and understand the emotions of other people. To a large extent, awareness of other people’s emotions is represented by empathy—having an understanding of and sensitivity to the feelings, thoughts, and situations of others. This ability includes understanding the other person’s situation, experiencing his or her emotions, and knowing his or her needs even though unstated. Awareness of others’ emotions extends beyond empathy. It also includes being organizationally aware, such as sensing office politics and understanding social networks.
Management of others’ emotions
This dimension of EI involves managing other people’s emotions. This includes consoling people who feel sad, emotionally inspiring your team members to complete a class project on time, getting strangers to feel comfort- able working with you, and managing dysfunctional emotions among staff who experience conflict with customers or other employees.
Job satisfaction
A person’s evaluation of his or her job and work context.
Exit-voice-loyalty-neglect (EVLN) model
The four ways, as indicated in the name, that employees respond to job dissatisfaction.
Exit
Exit includes leaving the organization, transferring to another work unit, or at least trying to get away from the dissatisfying situation. The traditional theory is that job dissatisfaction builds over time and is eventually strong enough to motivate employees to search for better work opportunities elsewhere. This is likely true to some extent, but the most recent opinion is that specific “shock events” quickly energize employees to think about and engage in exit behaviour. For example, the emotional reaction you experience to an unfair management decision or a conflict episode with a co-worker motivates you to look at job ads and speak to friends about job opportunities where they work. This begins the process of re-aligning your self-concept more with another company than with your current employer.
Voice
Voice is any attempt to change, rather than escape from, the dissatisfying situation. Voice can be a constructive response, such as recommending ways for management to improve the situation, or it can be more confrontational, such as filing formal grievances or forming a coalition to oppose a decision. In the extreme, some employees might engage in counterproductive behaviours to get attention and force changes in the organization.
Loyalty
In the original version of this model, loyalty was not an outcome of dissatisfaction. Rather, it determined whether people chose exit or voice (i.e., high loyalty resulted in voice; low loyalty produced exit). More recent writers describe loyalty as an outcome, but in various and somewhat unclear ways. Generally, they suggest that “loyalists” are employees who respond to dissatisfaction by patiently waiting— some say they “suffer in silence”—for the problem to work itself out or be resolved by others.
Neglect
Neglect includes reducing work effort, paying less attention to quality, and increasing absenteeism and lateness. It is generally considered a passive activity that has negative consequences for the organization.
Service profit chain model
A theory explaining how employees’ job satisfaction influences company profitability indirectly through service quality, customer loyalty, and related factors.
Affective organizational commitment
An individual’s emotional attachment to, involvement in, and identification with an organization.
Continuance commitment
An individual’s calculative attachment to an organization.
Building organizational commitment
- Justice and Support
- Shared Values
- Trust
- Organizational Comprehension
- Employee Involvement
Trust
Positive expectations one person has towards another person in situations involving risk. Trust means putting faith in the other person or group. It is also a reciprocal activity: To receive trust, you must demonstrate trust. Employees identify with and feel obliged to work for an organization only when they trust its leaders. This explains why layoffs are one of the greatest blows to affective commitment; by reducing job security, companies reduce the trust employees have in their employer and the employment relationship.
Justice and support
Affective commitment is higher in organizations that fulfill their obligations to employees and abide by humanitarian values, such as fairness, courtesy, forgiveness, and moral integrity. These values relate to the concept of organizational justice, which we discuss in the next chapter. Similarly, organizations that support employee well-being tend to cultivate higher levels of loyalty in return.
Shared values
The definition of affective commitment refers to a person’s identification with the organization, and that identification is highest when employees believe their values are congruent with the organization’s dominant values. Also, employees experience more comfort and predictability when they agree with the values underlying corporate decisions. This comfort increases their motivation to stay with the organization.
Organizational comprehension
Organizational comprehension refers to how well employees understand the organization, including its strategic direction, social dynamics, and physical layout. This awareness is a necessary prerequisite to affective commitment because it is difficult to identify with or feel loyal to something that you don’t know very well. Furthermore, lack of information produces uncertainty, and the resulting stress can distance employees from that source of uncertainty (i.e., the organization). The practical implication here is to ensure that employees develop a reasonably clear and complete mental model of the organization. This occurs by giving staff information and opportunities to keep up to date about organizational events, interact with coworkers, discover what goes on in different parts of the organization, and learn about the organization’s history and future plans.
Employee involvement
Employee involvement increases affective commitment by strengthening the employee’s psychological ownership and social identity with the organization. Employees feel that they are part of the organization when they participate in decisions that guide the organization’s future. Employee involvement also builds loyalty because giving this power is a demonstration of the company’s trust in its employees.
Stress
An adaptive response to a situation that is perceived as challenging or threatening to the person’s well-being.
General adaptation syndrome
A model of the stress experience, consisting of three stages: alarm reaction, resistance, and exhaustion.
Alarm reaction
occurs when a threat or challenge activates the physiological stress responses that were noted above. The individual’s energy level and coping effectiveness decrease in response to the initial shock.
Resistance
activates various bio- chemical, psychological, and behavioural mechanisms that give the individual more energy and engage coping mechanisms to overcome or remove the source of stress.
Exhaustion
Most of us are able to remove the source of stress or remove ourselves from that source before becoming too exhausted. However, people who frequently reach exhaustion have increased risk of long-term physiological and psychological damage.
Stressors
Environmental conditions that place a physical or emotional demand on the person.
Psychological harassment
Repeated and hostile or unwanted conduct, verbal comments, actions, or gestures that affect an employee’s dignity or psychological or physical integrity and that result in a harmful work environment for the employee.
Workaholic
A person who is highly involved in work, feels compelled to work, and has a low enjoyment of work.
Removing stressors by:
assigning employees to jobs that match their skills and preferences, reducing excessive work- place noise, having a complaint system and taking corrective action against harassment, and giving employees more control over the work process.
Five of the most common work–life balance initiatives are:
- Flexible and limited worktime
- Job sharing
- Telecommuting
- Personal leave
- Childcare support
Employee assistance programs (EAPs)
Counselling services that help employees resolve marital, financial, or work-related troubles.
