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9 Review

CHAPTER SUMMARY

style of making decisions. The Big Five Model consists of five
9-1 Identify the focus and goals of organizational personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientious-
behavior (OB). ness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. Another
way to view personality is through the five personality traits
that help explain individual behavior in organizations: locus of
OB focuses on three areas: individual behavior, group behavior,
and organizational aspects. The goals of OB are to explain, pre- control, Machiavellianism, self-esteem, self-monitoring, and
dict, and influence employee behavior. Six important employee risk taking.
behaviors are as follows: Employee productivity is a performance Finally, how a person responds emotionally and how they
measure of both efficiency and effectiveness. Absenteeism is the deal with their emotions is a function of personality. A person
failure to report to work. Turnover is the voluntary and involun- who is emotionally intelligent has the ability to notice and to
tary permanent withdrawal from an organization. Organizational manage emotional cues and information.
citizenship behavior (OCB) is discretionary behavior that’s not
part of an employee’s formal job requirements, but it promotes 9-4 Describe perception and the factors that
the effective functioning of an organization. Job satisfaction is an influence it.
individual’s general attitude toward his or her job. Workplace mis-
behavior is any intentional employee behavior that’s potentially
harmful to the organization or individuals within the organization. Perception is how we give meaning to our environment by orga-
nizing and interpreting sensory impressions.
Attribution theory helps explain how we judge people dif-
9-2 Explain the role that attitudes play in job ferently. It depends on three factors. Distinctiveness is whether
performance. an individual displays different behaviors in different situations
(that is, is the behavior unusual). Consensus is whether others
Attitudes are evaluative statements concerning people, objects, facing a similar situation respond in the same way. Consistency
or events. The cognitive component of an attitude refers to the is when a person engages in behaviors regularly and consis-
beliefs, opinions, knowledge, or information held by a person. tently. Whether these three factors are high or low helps man-
The affective component is the emotional or feeling part of an agers determine whether employee behavior is attributed to
attitude. The behavioral component refers to an intention to be- external or internal causes.
have in a certain way toward someone or something. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to under-
Four job-related attitudes include job satisfaction, job estimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the
involvement, organizational commitment, and employee en- influence of internal factors. The self-serving bias is the ten-
gagement. Job satisfaction refers to a person’s general attitude dency to attribute our own successes to internal factors and to
toward his or her job. Job involvement is the degree to which put the blame for personal failure on external factors. Shortcuts
an employee identifies with his or her job, actively participates used in judging others are selective perception, assumed simi-
in it, and considers his or her job performance to be important larity, stereotyping, and the halo effect.
to his or her self-worth. Organizational commitment is the de-
gree to which an employee identifies with a particular organi- 9-5 Discuss learning theories and their
zation and its goals, and wishes to maintain membership in that relevance in shaping behavior.
organization. Employee engagement is when employees are
connected to, satisfied with, and enthusiastic about their jobs.
According to cognitive dissonance theory, individuals try Operant conditioning argues that behavior is a function of its
to reconcile attitude and behavior inconsistencies by alter- consequences. Social learning theory says that individuals learn
ing their attitudes, altering their behavior, or rationalizing the by observing what happens to other people and by directly
inconsistency. experiencing something.
Managers can shape behavior by using positive
reinforcement (reinforcing a desired behavior by giving some-
9-3 Describe different personality theories. thing pleasant), negative reinforcement (reinforcing a desired
response by withdrawing something unpleasant), punishment
The MBTI measures four dimensions: social interaction, pref- (eliminating undesirable behavior by applying penalties), or
erence for gathering data, preference for decision making, and extinction (not reinforcing a behavior to eliminate it).

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