Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Individual intelligence
Those who do well on one mental test or task frequently do well on others
o Ex: IQ tests, SATs, GMATs, GREs, LSATs, etc.
However a poor indicator/predictor of group performance
o Group of smart people may not be good groups
Collective Intelligence
A groups general ability to successfully perform together
Important for collective efforts, collaboration, and consensus-based decision making
Types of tasks:
o Visual puzzles, brainstorming, collective moral judgments, negotiating over
limited resources, building exercises, games
Associated with:
o Social perceptiveness of group members
o Equality of participation in conversation
o Proportion of women in the group
This is why more women in groups
Inequality Theories
Sociology, psychology, and economics, have explored why decision makers may reach
biased assessments in labor markets
o Typically general theories; explain unequal outcomes associated with an
individuals characteristics
o May be applied to other non-employment settings
Generalizations
People are cognitive misers who economize through categorization
Why might individuals generalize?
o A response to uncertainty
o An innate desire to identify predictable processes and outcomes
o Basis in genetics?
From hunter-gatherer society
o How we build habits
Schemas
Processing of social phenomena
Theory derived from psychology
One of the primary tools associated with quick judgements
Pattern imposed on complex reality or experience to help interpret, explain, and predict
outcomes
Allows individuals to more effectively interact with the world
Earliest works: did not necessarily have to do with people
o Participants waited in an office for 35 seconds
o Then give surprise memory test
Average recall = 13.5 objects
Items with high schema expectancy and salience more likely to be
recalled
But things that were absent but would have been in an office were falsely
recalled also
Statistical Discrimination
Decision maker draws on group characteristics to make a decision about an individual
that is a member of that group (profiling)
Lecture 5: Personality
Definition of Personality
The sum total of ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts with others
o Robbins & Judge definition
o Sum total of ways = typical cognitions, emotions, and behaviors
o Ex: Shes really driven; He has high self-esteem; He is shy
An individuals characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with
the psychological mechanisms -- hidden or not -- behind those patterns
o Funders definition
Self-Monitoring
An individuals ability to adjust his or her behavior to external, situational factors
High self-monitors: good performance reviews, more mobile
Downside of this approach:
Snyders Self-Monitoring Scale
o In different situations and with different people, I often act like very different
persons
o Im not always the person I appear to be
Machiavellianism
The degree to which an individual is pragmatic, maintains emotional distance, and
believes that the ends justify the means
o
High Machs: highly persuasive, persuaded less, perform well in some jobs, less in others
MACH-IV
o It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there
o Anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble
Employment Ads
May lean towards certain set of psychological characteristics
What is Motivation?
A psychological process that arouses, directs, and maintains voluntary, purposeful,
and goal-directed behavior
An internal force that determines the choices people make among alternative courses of
action
Theories of Motivation
Content Theories
o Maslow, Herzberg, McClelland
Process theories
o Equity, goal setting, expectancy
Extrinsic motivation
We expect rewards or have learned are followed by specific consequences (money,
tangible matters)
Ex:
Intrinsic motivation
A natural inclination toward assimilation, mastery, spontaneous interest, and exploration,
which leads to two general kinds of behavior:
o Seeking stimulation
Seeking out novelty and challenges; to explore, to learn
o Conquering challenges
To extend or exercise our capabilities
There is no apparent reward other than the activity itself
Purpose: to satisfy an innate need to feel competent
Ex: (conquering challenges)
Equity Theory
I want to be treated fairly, and fairly means getting back how much I contributed
Ex: !
Goal-Setting Model
Goal: an intention to behave; motivational force
o Two major attributes
Content
The desired outcome
Includes how difficult, how specific, and how complex the goal is
Intensity
Goal importance, value relative to other goals, and commitment to
goal
Goals affect behavior by:
o Directing attention to the task
o Mobilizing on-task effort
o Encouraging task persistence
o Facilitating development of strategies
Who sets the goals, how, and what kind of goals?
o Specific vs. general
o Assigned vs. non-assigned (goal acceptance)
o Hard vs. easy
o Long-term vs. short-term
Job Design
How do we design jobs that are challenging, motivating, satisfying, and lead to high
performance?
Job Satisfaction
Attitude - a positive or negative evaluation of an object, person, or event
Usually consists of a global evaluation
o This aspect of my job in general, not necessarily today or right now
Does a persons attitude predict their performance?
o Not necessarily
Cognitive Dissonance
An inconsistency between two or more attitudes or behaviors
Uncomfortable feeling
To minimize:
o Change attitude
o Change behavior
o Rationalizing --
Cognitive Dissonance Experiment
Participants completed two long, painfully boring tasks
Assigned to one of following groups:
o Asked to lie to others that it was fun for $1
o Asked to lie to others that it was fun for $20
o No discussion with others (control)
Rated how enjoyable they actually thought the tasks were
o People who were paid $1 said it was more fun
How much annual income would you actually need to make to get happy?
Robbins and Judge: $40,000
o Enough to cover basic necessity
o But this was measure from 10 years ago
Other, more recent research: $75,000
o
o Happiness measure -- positive affect -- levels off at around $75,000
o Related to the ladder measure
Homeostatic model of subjective well-being
o Everyone has an individual setpoint of happiness
o Change in environmental shifts our level of happiness
o Psychological adaptations bring us back to setpoint
Big events can change our happiness for a short period of time, but it comes back
o Other things are less exciting by comparison
o We get bored of our new stuff
o We go back to pre-winning levels of happiness over time
Best way to measure happiness: longitudinal measures
In the Freshman Roommate Study, the scores of initial impression and 9 months later were one
positive and the other negative - huge change
Summary and Key Take-Aways
What is personality?
o Traditionally implies stability and uniqueness of behaviors, cognitions, and emotions
What can personality traits tell us?
o Can (sometimes) tell us how someone will perform overall
o Generally cannot tell us how someone will perform in a specific situation
What is the best way to find out about someones personality?
o Multiple observations across a wide range of situations
o Observations in specific situations of interest
Some employers are using personality assessments during screening
o Contentiousness tends to offer greater job performance insight
2/22 LECTURE NOTES
Critical Questions re: Worker Job Satisfaction
Is a happy worker a productive worker?
What does it mean to be a happy worker?
What makes a happy worker? Specifically, does paying employees more make them
happier?
A Happy Worker is a Productive Worker
This proposition was made in the 1930s and has been one of the most studied predictions in
organizational behavior
Represents the beginning of the Human Relations (HR) movement and, in some ways, the
Holy Grail of OB research
Hawthorne Studies (1927-1932)
Industrial plant located in Chicago (Western Electric company, Hawthorne Works)
Taylorism - organizing production minds in the most efficient way
Hawthorne in contrast gave more flexibility to workers -> greater worker involvement, sort of a
short experiment
Hawthorne effect - when people are observed, they work harder for some extent
(A Happy Worker is a Productive Worker continued) Research on this subject since the
1930s has been mixed!
Many researchers believe this is due, in part, to different operationalizations of the construct
of happiness
o Happiness as job satisfaction
o Happiness as positive affect
Job Satisfaction Scales
All things considered, how satisfied are you with your job?
OR
Ask yourself: How satisfied am I with this aspect of my job?
o The variety in my work
o The chance to work by myself
o My job security
o The amount I get paid
o The technical know-how of my supervisor
o The credit I get for the work that I do
o The routine in my work
o Being able to take pride in my work
o The chance to be alone on the job
o How my pay compares to that of others
o Being able to stay busy
Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction is an attitude - a positive or negative evaluation of an object, person, or event
Usually consists of a global evaluation - this aspect of my job in general, not necessarily
today or right now
Does a persons attitude about their job predict their work performance/job behaviors?
Attitudes and Behaviors
Why might a persons attitudes and behaviors not add up?
Attitude-behavior relationship is stronger when:
o Attitude is personally important
o Attitude corresponds to a specific behavior
Not like I am patriotic, Americ, etc.
o Attitude is regularly accessible
o We have direct experience with the topic
o There arent competing social pressures
Criticisms of Job Satisfaction Measures
Standard Job Satisfaction Measures
o Dont take importance into account, only belief
o Questions are rarely specific to work behaviors
o Job attitudes are not constantly accessible
For these reasons, job satisfaction is
o Only weakly to moderately related to performance outcomes that get at how individuals
perform on the job on a daily basis (exp: organizational citizenship behavior, absenteeism, etc.)
o More strongly related to performance outcomes like turnover, which is a broader, evaluative
decision
Measurement of Positive and Negative Job Satisfaction
How often do you feel/behave this way while working?
o I feel downhearted and blue
o I get tired for no reason
o My mind is clear
o I am irritable
o I have pep and energy
o I smile
o I feel hopeful about the future
o I chuckle or laugh
Positive and Negative Affectivity Scale (PANAS)
o Nervous
o Irritable
o Proud
o Alert
o Jittery
o Excited
o Upset
o Distressed
Positive and Negative Affect: Work Performance
Affect
o Is more strongly tied to specific work behaviors
o Is almost always immediately accessible
o Ex) how often do you smile?
More closely linked to motivation and specific work outcomes
o Positive affect linked to approach tendencies
o Happier people are generally viewed as smarter, have more influence, and find it easier to get
help
o Happier people tend to get more promotions, pay, and their performance is more positively
evaluated by their peers
Cognitive Dissonance
Ex. Jane selling a camera after finding out that the camera is defected
An inconsistency between two or more attitudes or behaviors
Is uncomfortable; people seek to minimize dissonance by:
o Changing an attitude
o Changing a behavior
o Rationalizing the inconsistency
What did you tell yourself if your attitudes and behaviors didnt add up?
Festinger and Carlsmith 1959 Experiment
Screwing and Unscrewing wooden blocks for 30 minutes and lying to subsequent person for $1
dollar and $20 dollars
When they were asked how enjoyable the task was,
$1 people said that they fairly enjoyed it -> Mentally reoriented themselves that they enjoyed it
$20 people didnt express so -> No need to conduct reorientation of thinking because they could
rationalize the inconsistency
Criticisms of the Relationship between Job Satisfaction and Work Behavior
Researchers/practitioners have largely assumed job satisfaction -> work performance
BUT cognitive dissonance suggests the relationship may go in the opposite direction, i.e.:
work performance -> job satisfaction
Based on most empirical evidence, we can rarely be sure about the direction of causality
Does [More] Money Make People Happy?
(iClicker question of How much annual income would you actually need to make so that no
additional amount of money would make you any happier?)
Robbins Judge: $40,000
Other Highly Cited Research (Kahneman and Deaton 2010): $75,000
The Ladder Measure
Assume that this ladder is a way of picturing your life. The top of the ladder represents the best
possible life for you. The bottom rung of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
Indicate where on the ladder you feel you personally stand right now by marking the circle.
The $75,000 Threshold
Recall the Implemented PPP at Safelite
PPP + Higher Guaranteed Wages, PPP + Lower Guaranteed Wages, No PPP
Releasing the stress of workers that they might not be able to meet the minimum number they
have to sell (because they have rent, other payments, etc.)
Graphs in PowerPoint
The Relationship Between Income and Happiness
Insufficient pay can make workers unhappy and dissatisfied, so employers need to pay
employees enough
But after a certain threshold, more pay doesnt necessarily make workers more happy (i.e.,
experience more positive affect)
However, individuals may continue to internally evaluate their lives (the ladder measure)
more positively with increasing income
I Still Really Think Id be Happier if I won a Million Dollars
Initial change and later adaptation ex. lottery winners
Adaptation Level Theory: The Hedonic Treadmill I
A homeostatic model of subjective well-being
o Everyone has an individual set point of happiness
o Change in the environment shifts our level of happiness
o Psychological adaptations bring us back to set point
Big event like winning the lottery changes our happiness for a short period of time, but
o Other things are less exciting by comparison
o We get bored of all our new stuff
o And we go back to pre-winning levels of happiness over time
Adaptation Level Theory: The Hedonic Treadmill II
(graph)
people rebounded afterward such difficulties
Similarly, moving to California wouldnt make you happier (why is this?)
Summary and Key Take-Aways
Is a happy worker a productive worker?
o Depends on operationalization of happiness
o May be the other way around (direction of effect is often unclear)
What does it mean to be a happy worker
o Positive affect is distinct from job satisfaction and may have different consequences
What makes a person happy with their job?
o Pay, but only to a point
o Other factors like task variety, autonomy, and social context may matter more
Robbins/Judge and Reading Notes by Yejee
Responses to dissatisfaction
o Constructive
o Destructive
o Active
o Passive
Exit response: Directs behavior toward leaving the organization
Voice response: Actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions
Loyalty response: Means passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to improve
Neglect response: Allows conditions to worsen and includes chronic absenteeism or
lateness, reduced effort, and increased error rate
Job satisfaction Relationships
Job Performance
OCB: organizational citizenship behavior
Customer satisfaction
Absenteeism
Turnover
Workplace deviance
Chapter 4: Emotions and Moods
What are emotions and moods?
Affect: Generic term that covers a broad range of feelings people experience
Moods: Less intense feelings than emotions that often arise without a specific event acting
as a stimulus
Emotions: Intense feelings directed at someone or something
Basic moods: Positive and Negative effect
Positive effect: Mood dimension consisting of positive emotions
Negative effect: Mood dimension consisting of nervousness, stress and anxiety
Experience moods and emotions
Positivity offset: At zero input, most individuals experience a mildly positive mood
Emotions make people irrational
Emotions make people ethical
Sources of emotions and moods
Personality
o Affect intensity: Experience the same emotions with different intensities
Time of the day
Day of the week
Weather
o Illusory correlation: occurs when we associate two events that in reality have no
connection, explains why people tend to think in a certain way
Stress
Social activities
Sleep
Exercise
Age
Sex
Emotional Labor
Felt emotions: Actual emotions
Displayed emotions: That the organization requires workers to show and considers
appropriate in a given job
Surface acting: Hiding inner feelings and emotional expression
Deep acting: Trying to modify our true inner feelings based on display rules
Emotional dissonance: When employees have to project one emotion while feeling another
Affective events theory
Demonstrates that employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work
Emotional intelligence
Persons ability to perceive emotions in the self and others, understand the meaning of
these emotions, and regulate ones emotions accordingly in a cascading model
Case for EI
Intuitive appeal
Predicts criteria that matter
Biologically based
Case agasint EI
Do not agree on definitions
Cant be measured
Nothing but personality with a different label
OB applications of emotions and moods
Selection
Decision making
Creativity
Motivation
Leadership
Negotiation
Customer service
Job attitude
Deviant workplace behaviors
Safety and injury at work
Chapter 5: Personality and values
Personality: Sum total of ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts with others-is
partly genetic in origin
Defining personality
o Allport dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical
systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment
Measuring personality
o Personality tests are useful in hiring decisions
Personality determinants
o Heredity
o Personality traits
Dominant personality frameworks:
Myers-Briggs type indicator: Most widely used personality assessment instrument in the
world-100 question personality test that asks how people feel in a situation
o Extraverted vs Introverted
o Sensing vs Intuitive
o Thinking vs Feeling
o Judging vs Perceiving
Introverts are more common
ISFJ and ISTJ are most common, INFJ are least common
Big Five Personality model
Five basic dimensions underlie all others and encompass most of significant variation in
human personality
o Extraversion: captures our comfort level with relationships
o Agreeableness: Individuals propensity to defer to others
o Conscientiousness: Measure of reliability
o Emotional stability: Taps a persons ability to withstand stress
o Openness to experience: Addresses range of interests and fascination with
novelty
How do big five traits predict behavior at work?
o Conscientiousness higher level of job performance
Other personality frameworks
Dark Triad: Three undesirable traits
o Machiavellianism: Pragmatic, maintains emotional distance and believes ends
can justify means
o Narcissism: A person who places self-importance as first
o Psychopathy: Defined as a lack of concern for others
Approach-Avoidance
Cast personality traits as motivations. Represent the degree to which we react to stimuli
whereby approach motivation is our attraction to positive stimuli
Other Personality traits relevant to OB
Core self-evaluations
o See themselves as effective, capable and in control of their environment
Self-monitoring
o Describes an individuals ability to adjust her behavior to external, situational
factors
Proactive personality
o Identify opportunities, show initiative, take action and persevere until
meaningful change occurs
Personality and situations
Situation strength theory: Proposes that they way personality translates into behavior
dependson the strength of the situation
1. Clarity
2. Consistency
3. Constraints
4. Consequences
Trait Activation theory: Predicts that some situations, events, or interventions activate a trait
more than others
Values
Represent basic convictions that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is
personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of
existence
Value system: System for ranking values in terms of intensity
Terminal values: Refers to desirable end-states
Instrumental values: Preferable modes of behavior, or means of achieving terminal values
Personal job fit
Personality-job fit theory: Six personality types and proposes that satisfaction and the
propensity to leave a position depend on how well individuals match their personalities to a
job
o Realistic, investigative, social, conventional, enterprising, artistic
Person-organization fit: People are attracted to and selected by organizations that match
their values
Hofstedes framework
Power distance: degree to which people in a country accept that power in institutions and
organizations is distributed unequally
Individualism vs Collectivism
o Individualism: Degree to which people prefer to act as individuals rather than as
members of groups and believe in individual rights above all else
o Collectivism: Emphasizes a tight social framework in which people expect
others in groups of which they are a part to look after them and protect them
Masculinity vs Femininity
o Degree to which they prefer masculinity or feininity
Uncertainty avoidance: Degree to which people in a country prefer structured over
unstructured situations
Long term vs Short term orientation
o Societys devotion to traditional values
Chapter 6: Perception and Individual Decision Making
Perception: Process by which individuals organize and interpret sensory impressions in
order to give meaning to their environment
Person perception: Making judgments about others
Attribution theory: Tries to explain the ways we judge people differently, depending on the
meaning we attribute to a behavior.
*Look at diagram
Fundamental attribution error: Explain why a sales manager is prone to attribute the poor
performance of her sales agents to laziness rather than to a competitors innovative product
line
Self-serving bias: When people attribute ambiguous info as relatively flattering, accept
positive feedback and reject negative feedback
Common shortcuts in judging others
Selective perception: select according to our interests, background, experience and attitude
Halo effect: When we draw an impression about an individual on the basis of a single
characteristic
Contrast effects: Distort perceptions. Reaction is influenced by other persons we have
recently encountered
Stereotyping: When we judge someone on the basis of our perception of the group to which
he belongs
Decision making in organizations
Rational decision making: makes consistent, value maximizing choices within
specified constraints
1. Define the problem
2. Identify the decision criteria
3. Allocate weights to the criteria
4. Develop the alternatives
5. Evaluate the alternatives
6. Select the best alternative
Bounded rationality
We can behave rationally within the limits of the simple model
Intuition
Nonconscious process created from distilled experience
Common biases and errors in decision making
Overconfidence bias
o Reducing:
Focus on goals
Look for info that disconfirms your beliefs
Dont try to create meaning out of random events
Increase your options
Anchoring bias: Tendency to fixate on initial info and fail to adequately adjust
for subsequent info
Confirmation bias: Represents a case of selective perception
Availability bias: Tendency to base judgments on information readily available
Escalation of commitment: Our staying with a decision even if there is clear
evidence its wrong
Risk aversion: This tendency to prefer a sure thing over a risky outcome
Hindsight bias: Is the tendency to believe falsely, after the outcome is known,
that we would have accurately predicted it
Organizational constraints on decision making
Performance evaluation
Reward systems
Formal regulation
System-imposed time constraints
Historical precedents
What about ethics in decision making?
3 Ethical decision criteria
o Utilitarianism: Proposes making decisions solely on the basis of their outcomes
o Whistle blowers: When they reveal an organizations unethical practices to the
press or government agencies, using their right to free speech
Creativity in organizations
Three-stage model of creativity
o Causes of creative behavior
Creative potential
Creative environment
o Creative behavior
1. Problem formulation
2. Information gathering
3. Idea generation
4. Idea evaluation
o Creative outcomes
Human Capital-Gary S Becker
Human capital: People cannot be separated from their knowledge, skills, health or values in
the way they can be separated fro mtheir financial and physical assets
Education, training, health are the most important investments
High school and college education greatly raise a persons income even after netting out
direct and indirect costs of schooling
Higher education is an investment
Benefits of a college education increased in 1980s and 1990s
Women gravitated more towards teaching, home economics, foreign languages and
literature
Increase in labor participation of married women most important labor force change during
past 25 years
New technological advances are of little value to countries that have very few skilled
workers who know how to use them
Employee selection: Will intelligence and conscientiousness do the job?-Behling
Hiring is about finding people with the right mindset
Hire for attitude and train for skill
GI predicts performance, it also predicts employee job knowledge
Relation between g and performance holds beyond the employees first weeks or months on
the job
Relationship between g and performance is stronger for supervisors than it is for non-
supervisors
Reading resumes and interviewing for evidence of G
School grades: Do not indicate G perfectly
Vocabulary: Relates highly to g
Problem solving success: Many jobs and hobbies involve problem solving
Reading resumes and interview for evidence of conscientiousness
Preparation for the interview: More prepared is probably more conscientious
Dress and self-presentation: Someone who dressed appropriately shows at least some signs
of conscientiousness
Career progression: Careful career planning would appear to be an attribute of those high in
conscientiousness
SG Cohen
Firm for top-tier research and strong equity sales and trading capabilities
Remain a boutique-sized firm but had access to the parents balance sheet
Team captains to every school students had a constant and familiar point of contact
Raes strategy: Core business schools company presentation in advance of the interview
dates
o Who are we
o What do we do
o What distinguishes us from competitors
o What are the next steps
On campus round super Saturday
Hiring criteria
o Using grid sheets for bankers to fill out vote
Candidates
o Natalya Godlewska
MBA in Cornell, high GPA, language barrier, financial background
o Martin Street
Second-year Wharton MBA who served 4 years in military, leadership,
dynamic personality
o Ken Goldstein
Second-year MBA at Berkeley who worked at PWC for 5 years
Quickly rose to be a manager at PWC
o Andy Sanchez
2 year MBA at USC, completed his undergraduate degree in UCLA,
nd
Ann Hopkins
Ann Hopkins thought that her being not promoted was because of her gender
Bias-gender
; wearing makeup, being feminine
Taste bias-
Skills- interpersonal skills
Employed 7 females already- not a sexist?
Price Waterhouse said- they had talented female workers but other companies took
them.--?
Why wouldn't they want to stay?--maybe bc of taste based bias just like Ann
Hopkins
Not a career progression.
Salary
Ann Hopkins def. had weak interpersonal skills
Overwhelming clues underlying gender issues
It is not really a strong sex discrimination case ?
Acknowledging some advantages only females may have?
Thomas Beyer advising her about make-up and dressing in more feminine
manner
1980s
What if a man wore and behave in more "feminine" way/ then they would've
said the same thing?
Is it appropriate to comment on dress hygienic
but what she was advised was not very relevant to her work