Learning Outcomes

• Define perception and describe the four-stage model of social perception.
• Explain how external and internal causal attributions are formulated.
• Distinguish between self-esteem and self-efficacy.
• Identify and describe the Big five personality dimensions, and specify which one is correlated most strongly with job performance.
• Describe the attitude called “job satisfaction” and explain its relationship to work motivation, organizational commitment, and job performance.
• Distinguish between positive and negative emotions, and describe a person with high emotional intelligence.

Chapter Summary

1. Define perception and describe the four-stage model of social perception. Perception is a cognitive process that enables us to interpret and understand our surroundings. Social perception, also known as social cognition, is a four-stage process. The four stages are selective attention/comprehension, encoding and simplification, storage and retention, and retrieval and response. During social cognition, salient stimuli are assigned to cognitive categories, and stored in long-term memory.

2. Explain how external and internal causal attributions are formulated. Attribution theory attempts to describe how people infer causes for observed behaviour. External attributions tend to be made when consensus and distinctiveness are high and consistency is low. Internal (personal responsibility) attributions tend to be made when consensus and distinctiveness are low and consistency is high.

3. Identify and describe the Big Five personality dimensions, and specify which one is correlated most strongly with job performance. The Big Five personality dimensions are extraversion (social and talkative), agreeableness (trusting and cooperative), conscientiousness (responsible and persistent), emotional stability (relaxed and unworried), and openness to experience (intellectual and curious). Conscientiousness is the best predictor of job performance.

4. Describe the attitude called "job satisfaction" and explain its relationship to work motivation, organizational commitment, and job performance. Job satisfaction is an attitude concerning one's job, whereby one feels either favourably or unfavourably disposed to his or her job. Job satisfaction has a moderate positive correlation with work motivation, a strong positive correlation with organizational commitment, and a weak positive correlation with job performance.

5. Distinguish between positive and negative emotions, and describe a person with high emotional intelligence. Positive emotions-happiness/joy, pride, love/affection, and relief-are personal reactions to circumstances congruent with one's goals. Negative emotions-anger, fright/anxiety, guilt/shame, sadness, envy/jealousy, and disgust-are personal reactions to circumstances incongruent with one's goals. Someone with high emotional intelligence has the ability to recognize and control their own emotions, to direct their own emotions toward personal goals, to understand and be sensitive to the feelings of others, and to manage the emotions of others.