Unit 3 Flashcards
Describe the elements of self-concept and explain how each affects an individual’s behaviour and well-being.
Self-concept includes an individual’s self-beliefs and self-evaluations. It has three structural characteristics—complexity, consistency, and clarity—all of which influence employee well-being, behaviour, and performance. People are inherently motivated to promote and protect their self-concept (self-enhancement) and to verify and maintain their existing self-concept (self-verification). Self-evaluation consists of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and locus of control. Self-concept also consists of both personal identity and social identity. Social identity theory explains how people define themselves by the groups to which they belong or have an emotional attachment.
Outline the perceptual process and discuss the effects of categorical thinking and mental models in that process.
Perception involves selecting, organizing, and interpreting information to make sense of the world around us. Perceptual organization applies categorical thinking—the mostly nonconscious process of organizing people and objects into preconceived categories that are stored in our long-term memory. Mental models— knowledge structures that we develop to describe, explain, and predict the world around us—also help us make sense of incoming stimuli.
Discuss how stereotyping, attribution, and the self-fulfilling prophecy, halo, false-consensus, primacy, and recency effects influence the perceptual process.
Stereotyping occurs when people assign traits to others based on their membership in a social cate- gory. This assignment economizes mental effort, fills in missing information, and enhances our self-concept, but it also lays the foundation for stereotype threat as well as systemic and intentional discrimination. The attribution pro- cess involves deciding whether an observed behaviour or event is caused mainly by the person (internal factors) or the environment (external factors). Attributions are decided by perceived consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus of the behaviour. This process is subject to self-serving bias and fundamental attribution error. A self-fulfilling proph- ecy occurs when our expectations about another person cause that person to act in a way that is consistent with those expectations. This effect is stronger when employees first join the work unit, when several people hold these expecta- tions, and when the employee has a history of low achievement. Four other perceptual errors commonly observed in organizations are the halo effect, false-consensus effect, primacy effect, and recency effect.
Discuss three ways to improve perceptions, with specific application to organizational situations.
One way to minimize perceptual biases is to become more aware of their existence. Awareness of these biases makes people more mindful of their thoughts and actions, but this training sometimes reinforces rather than reduces reliance on stereotypes and tends to be ineffective for people with deeply held prejudices. A second strategy is to become more aware of biases in our own decisions and behaviour. Self-awareness increases through formal tests such as the IAT and by applying the Johari Window, which is a process in which others pro- vide feedback to you about your behaviour, and you offer disclosure to them about yourself. The third strategy is meaningful interaction, which applies the contact hypothesis that people who interact will be less prejudiced or perceptually biased toward one another. Meaningful interaction is strongest when people work closely and fre- quently with relatively equal status on a shared meaningful task that requires cooperation and reliance on one another. Meaningful interaction may improve empathy, which is a person’s understanding and sensitivity to the feelings, thoughts, and situations of others
Outline the main features of a global mindset and justify its usefulness to employees and organization
A global mindset refers to an individual’s ability to perceive, know about, and process information across cultures. This includes (1) an awareness of, openness to, and respect for other views and practices in the world; (2) the capacity to empathize and act effectively across cultures; (3) an ability to process complex informa- tion about novel environments; and (4) the ability to comprehend and reconcile intercultural matters with multiple levels of thinking. A global mindset enables people to develop better cross-cultural relationships, to digest huge volumes of cross-cultural information, and to identify and respond more quickly to emerging global opportunities. Employees develop a global mindset through self-awareness, opportunities to compare their own mental models with people from other cultures, formal cross-cultural training, and immersion in other cultures.
