11.1 Values, Attitudes, & Behavior

• Organizational behavior (OB) is dedicated to better understanding and managing people at work. OB looks at two areas: individual behavior (discussed in this chapter) and group behavior (discussed in later chapters).
• Values must be distinguished from attitudes and from behavior. (1)Values are abstract ideals that guide one's thinking and behavior across all situations. (2) Attitudes are defined as learned predispositions toward a given object. Attitudes have three components. The affective component consists of the feelings or emotions one has about a situation. The cognitive component consists of the beliefs and knowledge one has about a situation. The behavioral component refers to how one intends or expects to behave toward a situation. When attitudes and reality collide, the result may be cognitive dissonance, the psychological discomfort a person experiences between his or her cognitive attitude and incompatible behavior. Cognitive dissonance depends on three factors: importance, control, and rewards. The ways to reduce cognitive dissonance are to change your attitude and/or your behavior, belittle the importance of the inconsistent behavior, or find consonant elements that outweigh the dissonant ones. (3) Together, values and attitudes influence people's workplace behavior—their actions and judgments.

11.2 Work-Related Attitudes & Behaviors Managers Need to Deal With

• Managers need to be alert to work-related attitudes having to do with (1) job satisfaction, the extent to which you feel positively or negatively about various aspects of your work; (2) job involvement, the extent to which you identify or are personally involved with your job; and (3) organizational commitment, reflecting the extent to which an employee identifies with an organization and is committed to its goals.
• Among the types of behavior that managers need to influence are (1) performance and productivity and (2) absenteeism, when an employee doesn't show up for work, and turnover, when employees leave their jobs.

11.3 Personality & Individual Behavior

• Personality consists of the stable psychological traits and behavioral attributes that give a person his or her identity. There are five personality dimensions and four personality traits that managers need to be aware of to understand workplace behavior.
• The Big Five personality dimensions are extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. Extroversion, an outgoing personality, is associated with success for managers and salespeople. Conscientiousness, or a dependable personality, is correlated with successful job performance. A person who scores well on conscientiousness may be a proactive personality, someone who is more apt to take initiative and persevere to influence the environment.
• There are four personality traits that managers need to be aware of in order to understand workplace behavior. (1) Locus of control indicates how much people believe they control their fate through their own efforts. (2) Self-efficacy is the belief in one's personal ability to do a task. Low self-efficacy is associated with learned helplessness, the debilitating lack of faith in one's ability to control one's environment. (3) Self-esteem is the extent to which people like or dislike themselves. (4) Self-monitoring is the extent to which people are able to observe their own behavior and adapt it to external situations.

11.4 Perception & Individual Behavior

• Perception is the process of interpreting and understanding one's environment. The process can be boiled down to four steps: selective attention, interpretation and evaluation, storing in memory, and retrieving from memory to make judgments and decisions. Perceptual errors can lead to mistakes that affect management.
• Three types of distortion in perception are (1) selective perception, the tendency to filter out information that is discomforting, that seems irrelevant, or that contradicts one's beliefs; (2) stereotyping, the tendency to attribute to an individual the characteristics one believes are typical of the group to which that individual belongs; and (3) the halo effect, the forming of an impression of an individual based on a single trait.
• The self-fulfilling prophecy (Pygmalion effect) describes the phenomenon in which people's expectations of themselves or others leads them to behave in ways that make those expectations come true.
• Causal attribution is the activity of inferring causes for observed behavior, which may be correct or incorrect. People may make causal attributions after they gather information about three dimensions of behavior: consensus, in which you compare a person's behavior with peer behavior; consistency, in which you look to see if a person behaves the same way at different times; and distinctiveness, in which you look to see if a person behaves the same way in other situations.
• As a manager, you need to be alert to two attributional tendencies that can distort your interpretation of observed behavior. (1) In the fundamental attribution bias, people attribute another person's behavior to his or her personal characteristics rather than to situational factors. (2) In the self-serving bias, people tend to take more personal responsibility for success than for failure.

11.5 Understanding Stress & Individual Behavior

• Stress is the tension people feel when they are facing or enduring extraordinary demands, constraints, or opportunities and are uncertain about their ability to handle them effectively. Stress is the feeling of tension and pressure; the source of stress is called a stressor.
• There are five sources of stress on the job: individual tasks, individual roles, groups, organizations, and nonwork factors. (1) Individual task demands are the stresses created by the job itself. (2) Individual role demands are the stresses created by other people's expectations of you. Roles are sets of behaviors that people expect of occupants of a position. Stress may come about because of role overload, role conflict, or role ambiguity. (3) Group demands are the stresses created by coworkers and managers. (4) Organizational demands are the stresses created by the environment and culture of the organization. (5) Nonwork demands are the stresses created by forces outside the organization, such as money problems or divorce.
• Positive stress can be constructive. Negative stress can result in poor-quality work; such stress is revealed through physiological, psychological, or behavioral signs such as burnout, a state of emotional, mental, and even physical exhaustion.
• There are buffers, or administrative changes, that managers can make to reduce the stressors that lead to employee burnout, such as adding extra staff or giving employees more power to make decisions. Some general organizational strategies for reducing unhealthy stressors are to create a supportive organizational climate, make jobs interesting, and make career counseling available.