Organizational Behaviour Terms

Behavioural sciences – fields such as psychology and sociology that seek knowledge of human behaviour and society through the use of the scientific method

Organizational behaviour – the field that seeks increased knowledge of all aspects of behaviour in organizational settings through the use of the scientific method

Theory X – A traditional philosophy of management suggesting that most people are lazy and irresponsible and will work hard only when forced to do so

Theory Y – A philosophy of management suggesting that under the right circumstances, people are fully capable of working productively and accepting responsibility for their work

Organization – a structured social system consisting of groups and individuals working together to meet some agreed-upon objectives

Open systems – self-sustaining systems that transform input from the external environment into output, which the system then returns to the environment

Contingency approach – a perspective suggesting that organizational behaviour is affected by a large number of interacting factors. How someone will behave is said to be contingent upon many different variables at once.

Scientific management – an early approach to management and organizational behaviour emphasizing the importance of designing jobs as efficiently as possible

Time-and-motion study – A type of applied research designed to classify and streamline the individual movements needed to perform jobs with the intent of finding the most efficient way of doing them

Human relations movement – a perspective on organizational behaviour that recognizes the importance of social processes in work settings

Classical organizational theory – an early approach to the study of management that focused on the most efficient way of structuring organizations

Bureaucracy – an organizational design developed by Max Weber that attempts to make organizations operate efficiently by having a clear hierarchy of authority in which people are required to perform well-defined jobs

Theory – effects by scientists to explain why various events occur as they do. Theories consist of basic concepts and assertions regarding the relationship between them

Correlational research – an empirical research technique in which variables of interest are identified and carefully measured. These measures are then analyzed statistically to determine the extent to which they are related to one another

Multiple regression – a statistical technique indicating the extent to which each of several variables contributes to accurate predictions of another variable

Experimental method – an empirical research method in which one or more variables are systematically varied (the independent variables) to determine if such changes have any impact on the behaviour of interest (the dependent variables)

Naturalistic observation – a qualitative research technique in which an investigator observes events occurring in an organization while attempting not to affect those events by being present

Participant observation – naturalistic observations of an organization made by individuals who have been hired as employees

Case method – a qualitative research method in which a particular organization is studied in detail, usually in the hopes of being able to learn about organizational functioning in general


Personality

Personality – the unique and relatively stable patterns of behaviour, thoughts, and emotions shown by individuals

Interactionist perspective – the view that behaviour is a result of a complex interplay between personality and situational factors

Person-job fit – the extent to which individuals possess the traits and competencies required to perform specific jobs

“Big five” dimensions of personality – five basic dimensions of personality that are assumed to underlie many specific traits; conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, openness to experience

Positive affectivity – the tendency to experience positive moods and feelings in a wide range of settings and under many different conditions

Negative affectivity – the tendency to experience negative moods in a wide range of settings and under many different conditions

Type A behaviour pattern – a pattern of behaviour involving high levels of competitiveness, time urgency, and irritability

Type B behaviour pattern – a pattern of behaviour characterized by a casual, laid-back style; the opposite of Type A behaviour pattern

Proactive personality – a personality trait reflecting the extent to which individuals seek to change the environment to suit their purposes and to capitalize on various opportunities

Self-efficacy – individuals’ beliefs concerning their ability to perform specific tasks successfully

Self-monitoring – a personality trait involving the extent to which individuals adapt their behaviour to the demands of specific situations, primarily to make the best possible impression on others

Machiavellianism – a personality trait involving willingness to manipulate others for one’s own purposes

Achievement motivation – the strength of an individual’s desire to excel – to succeed at difficult tasks and to do them better than other persons

Power motivation – the strength of an individual’s desire to be in charge, to be able to exercise control over others

Affiliation motivation – the strength of an individual’s desire to have close, friendly relations with others

Leadership motivation pattern (LMP) – a pattern of personality traits involving high power motivation, low affiliation motivation, and a high degree of self-control

Emotional intelligence – the ability to perceive and control emotions

Objective tests – questionnaires and inventories designed to measure various aspects of personality

Projective tests – methods for measuring personality in which individuals respond to ambiguous stimuli. Their responses provide insights into their personality traits

Reliability – the extent to which a test yields consistent scores on various occasions, and the extent to which all of its items measure the same underlying construct

Validity – the extent to which a test actually measures what it claims to measure

Chapter 6: Work-Related Attitudes: Feelings about Jobs, Organization and People

Attitudes – stable clusters of feelings, beliefs, and behavioural intentions towards specific objects, people, or institutions

Job Descriptive Index (JDI) – a rating scale for assessing job satisfaction. Individuals respond to this questionnaire by indicating whether or not various adjectives describe aspects of their work

Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) – a rating scale for assessing job satisfaction in which people indicate the extent to which they are satisfied with various aspects of their jobs

Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire (PSQ) – a questionnaire designed to assess employees’ level of satisfaction with various aspects of their pay (e.g., its overall level, raises, benefits)

Critical incidents technique – a procedure for measuring job satisfaction in which employees describe incidents relating to their work that they have found especially satisfying or dissatisfying

Two-factor theory (of job satisfaction) – a theory, devised by Herzberg, suggesting that satisfaction and dissatisfaction stem from different groups of variables (motivators and hygienes, respectively)

Value theory (of job satisfaction) – theory, devised by Locke, suggesting that job satisfaction depends primarily on the match between the outcomes individuals value in their jobs and their perceptions about the availability of such outcomes

Employee withdrawal – actions, such as chronic absenteeism and voluntary turnover (i.e., quitting one’s job), that enable employees to escape from adverse organizational situations

Organizational commitment – the extent to which an individual identifies and is involved with his or her organization and/or is unwilling to leave it

Side-bet orientation – the view of organizational commitment that focuses on the accumulated investments an individual stands to lose if he or she laves the organization

Goal-congruence orientation – an approach to organizational commitment according to which the degree of agreement between individual’s personal goals and those of the organization is a determinant of organizational commitment

Continuance commitment – the strength of a person’s desire to continue working for an organization because he or she needs to do so and cannot afford to do otherwise

Affective commitment – the strength of a person’s desire to work for an organization because he or she agrees with it and wants to do so

Normative commitment – the strength of a person’s desire to continue working for an organization because he or she feels obligations from others to remain there

Prejudice – negative attitudes toward the members of specific groups, based solely on the fact that they are members of those groups (e.g., age, race, sexual orientation)

Discrimination – the behaviour consistent with a prejudicial attitude; the act of treating someone negatively because of his or her membership in a specific group

Generation X – the generation of people born at the end of the baby boom, 1960-1966

Generation Y – The generation of people born between 1967 and 1979

Diversity management programs – programs in which employees are taught to celebrate the differences between people and in which organizations create supportive work environments for women and minorities

Awareness-based diversity training – a type of diversity management program designed to make people more aware of diversity issues in the workplace and to get them to recognize the underlying assumptions they make about people

Skills-based diversity training – an approach to diversity management that goes beyond awareness-based diversity training and is designed to develop people’s skills with respect to managing diversity


The Work Environment: Culture

Organizational culture – a cognitive framework consisting of attitudes, values, behavioural norms, and expectations shared by organizational members

Subcultures – cultures existing within parts of organizations rather than entirely through them. Members of subcultures share values in addition to the core values of their organization as a whole

Dominant culture – the overall culture of an organization, reflected by core values that are shared throughout the organization


Perception and Learning: Understanding and Adapting to the Work Environment

Perception – the process through which we select, organize, and interpret information gathered by our senses in order to understand the world around us

Social perception – the process through which individuals attempt to combine, integrate, and interpret information about others

Attribution – the process through which individuals attempt to determine the causes of others’ behaviour

Correspondent inferences – judgments made about what someone is like based on observations of his or her behaviour

Kelley’s theory of causal attribution – the approach suggesting that people will believe others’ actions to be caused by internal or external factors based on three types of information: consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness

Perceptual biases – predispositions that people have to misperceive others in various systematic ways

Fundamental attribution error – the tendency to attribute others’ actions to internal causes (e.g., their traits) while largely ignoring external factors that also may have influenced their behaviour

Halo effect – the tendency for our overall impressions of others to affect objective evaluations of their specific traits; perceiving high correlations between characteristics that may be unrelated

Similar-to-me effect – the tendency for people to perceive in a positive light others who are believed to be similar to themselves in any of several different ways

First-impression error – the tendency to base our judgments of others on our earlier impressions of them

Selective perception – the tendency to focus on some aspects of the environment while ignoring others

Stereotypes – beliefs that all members of specific groups share similar traits and behaviours

Performance appraisal – the process of evaluating employees on various work-related dimensions

Impression management – efforts by individuals to improve how they appear to others

Corporate image – the impressions that people have of an organization

Operant conditioning (or instrumental conditioning) – the form of learning in which people associate the consequences of their actions with the actions themselves. Behaviours with positive consequences are acquired; behaviours with negative consequences tend to be eliminated

Law of Effect – the tendency for behaviours leading to desirable consequences to be strengthened and those leading to undesirable consequences to be weakened

Positive reinforcement – the process by which people learn to perform behaviours that lead to the presentation of desired outcomes

Negative reinforcement (of avoidance) – the process by which people learn to perform acts that lead to the removal of undesired events

Punishment – decreasing undesirable behaviour by following it with undesirable consequences

Extinction – the process through which responses that are no longer reinforced tend to gradually diminish in strength

Contingencies of reinforcement – the various relationships between one’s behaviour and the consequences of that behaviour – positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment and extinction

Continuous reinforcement – a schedule of reinforcement in which all desired behaviours are reinforced

Partial (or intermittent) reinforcement – a schedule of reinforcement in which only some desired behaviours are reinforced. Types include: fixed interval, variable interval, fixed ratio, and variable ratio

Fixed internal schedules – schedules of reinforcement in which a fixed period of time must elapse between the administration of reinforcements

Variable interval schedules – schedules of reinforcement in which a variable period of time (based on some average) must elapse between the administration of reinforcements

Fixed ratio schedules – schedules of reinforcement in which a fixed number of responses must occur between the administration of reinforcements

Variable ratio schedules – schedules of reinforcement in which a variable number of responses (based on some average) must occur between the administration of reinforcements

Schedules of reinforcement – rules governing the timing and frequency of the administration of reinforcement

Observational learning (or modeling) – the form of learning in which people acquire new behaviours by systematically observing the rewards and punishments given to others

Feedback – knowledge of results of one’s behaviour

Organizational behaviour management (or modification or OB Mod) – the practice of altering behaviour in organizations by systematically administering rewards

Shaping – the process of selectivity reinforcing behaviours that approach a desired goal behaviour

Discipline – the process of systematically administering punishments

Progressive discipline – the practice of gradually increasing the severity of punishments for employees who exhibit unacceptable job behaviour


Motivation in Organizations

Motivation – the set of processes that arouse, direct, and maintain human behaviour toward attaining some goal

Need hierarchy theory – Maslow’s theory specifying that there are five human needs (physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization) and that these are arranged such that lower, more basic needs must be satisfied before higher-level needs become activated

Self-actualization – the need to discover who we are and to develop ourselves to our full potential

ERG theory – an alternative to Maslow’s need hierarchy theory processed by Alderfer, which assets that there are three basic human needs: existence, relatedness, and growth

Outplacement services – assistance in finding new jobs, which companies provide to employees they lay off

Goal setting – the process of determining specific levels of performance for workers to attain

Goal commitment – the degree to which people accept and strive to attain goals

Equity theory – the theory stating that people strive to maintain ratios of their own outcomes (rewards) to their own inputs (contributions) that are equal to the outcome/input ratios of others with whom they compare themselves

Outcomes – the rewards employees receive from their jobs, such as salary and recognition

Inputs – people’s contributions to their jobs, such as their experience, qualifications, or the amount of time worked

Overpayment inequity – the condition, resulting in feelings of guilt, in which the ratio of one’s outcomes to inputs is more than the corresponding ratio of another person with whom that person compares himself or herself

Underpayment inequity – the condition, resulting in feelings of anger, in which the ratio of one’s outcomes to inputs is less than the corresponding ratio of another person with whom that person compares himself or herself

Equitable payment – the state in which one person’s outcome/input ratio is equivalent to that of another person with whom this individual compares himself or herself

Two-tier wage structures – payment systems in which newer employees are paid less than employees hired at earlier times to do the same work

Procedural justice – perceptions of the fairness of the procedures used to determine outcomes

Expectancy theory – the theory that assets that motivation is based on people’s beliefs about the probability that effort will lead to performance (expectancy), multiplied by the probability that performance will lead to reward (instrumentality), multiplied by the perceived value of the reward (valence)

Expectancy – the belief that one’s efforts will positively influence one’s performance

Instrumentality – an individual’s beliefs regarding the likelihood of being rewarded in accord with his or her own level of performance

Valence – the value a person places on the rewards he or she receives from an organization

Cafeteria-style benefit plans – incentive systems in which employees have an opportunity to select the fringe benefits they want from a menu of available alternatives

Pay-for-performance plan – a payment system in which employees are paid differentially, based on the quantity and quality of their performance. Pay-for-performance plans strengthen instrumentality beliefs

Job design – an approach to motivation suggesting that jobs can be created so as to enhance people’s interest in doing them

Job enlargement – the practice of expanding the content of a job to include more variety and greater number of tasks at the same level

Job enrichment – the practice of giving employees a high degree of control over their work, from planning and organization, through implementing the jobs and evaluating the results

Job characteristics model – an approach to job enrichment which specifies that five core job dimensions (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and job feedback) produce critical psychological states that lead to beneficial outcomes for individuals (e.g., high job satisfaction) and the organization (e.g., reduced turnover)

Motivating potential score (MPS) – a mathematical index describing the degree to which a job is designed so as to motivate people, as suggested by the job characteristics model. It is computed on the basis of a questionnaire known as the Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS)