Lecture notes with Social and Organisation psychology at the Leiden University - 2018/2019

WEEK 1

Lecture 1 – Social      04/02/19

Introduction

We’re all basic social psychologists all constantly using social assumptions, social derivations of what we see and observe of other people.

We, humans, are a social species -> Social brain hypothesis. Our prefrontal cortex has increased considerable in size over the ages. This led to Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis and experiment. In order to perform well in larger social groups, we need bigger brains. large correlation between larger brain and larger social groups.

Social psychology: what happens to an individual in a group and situations on a group, aka how context influences an individual.

Situational factors used to explain large events such as terrorist attacks or genocide. What makes good people perform such bad act?

Kurt Lewin: Behaviour = f(person x situation). If you want to understand a behaviour, you must look at what happens to a person who finds themselves in a particular situation.

Almost all situations we find ourselves in are social.

Three aspects within social psychology: cognition, motivation and behaviour (interaction between the other two).

Recurring themes:  Individual vs group, cognition vs affect, genes vs environment, evolution vs culture.

If two variable correlate is can be in two ways. X causes Y, X and Y cause Z or Z influences X and Y. If two things seem to correlate but in reality don’t, it is called spurious correlation. If you have a very large data set, it is easy to find any correlation that seems to be true. Correlations are easier to obtain, but they do not say anything about cause and effect, so that is why we perform experiments.

Social psychology often deals with more sensitive topics. Now, we are bound to ethics, but a lot of our information we get from experiments in the past that seriously lacked any ethics boundaries. Important now is that people sign their complete consent.

Social Cognition

Themes of the topic social cognition

1. Humans are ‘cognitive misers’.

We tend to avoid most cognitive effort, we dislike thinking deeply about a lot of things, as well as making and effort of controlling, thinking about and registering thoughts. Decision fatigue means that the more decisions are already made and the later in the day it is, the less likely you will make a cognitive decision. Heuristics: things that create decision fatigue.

1. 1. Representative heuristics means does it look correct with what we know? Conjunction fallacy: we ignore statistics and instead take a socially logical decision.
   2. Availability heuristic: we base decisions on the information that is most available and clear from our memory.
   3. Anchoring: our point of reference influences our decisions.
2. Humans are efficient and well organised information processors

A lot of our heuristics are based mostly on schema’s. Schema’s are mental frameworks that organize social information and guide our perceptions. There are different types of schema’s: Person schema, role schema, script self-schema’s. Schema’s guide our attention, what we store in our memory and what we retrieve from our memory.  Our attention’s focus can make us miss a lot of crucial information -> our schema’s tell us where to focus our attention.

In addition to that, we tend to seek out information which will confirm our schema’s or what we already know, in result making us act along the lines of what we already know.

Schema’s come to mind quickly because they are automatic. Automaticity means the things we do on an automatic basis. This is either because of our schema’s or because of priming. Automatism are very efficient, especially when dealing with a lot of information.

We also deal with negativity bias. A bad sensation is always more powerful than a good one, simply because bad thing can have a quicker, larger influence on our lives than good things.

Opposing is the positivity bias. This takes two forms. Optimistic bias is the tendency to overlook risks and expect good outcomes. Planning fallacy is the tendency to think that a task takes less time than it actually will.

Regret is a very strong emotion that affects our behaviour. It is a consequence of counterfactual thinking – comparing what is and what could have been and deciding that the present is the worst-case scenario.

3. Cognition and affect are connected.

We are more likely to remember positive things when we are feeling good and remember negative things when we feel like shit.  This is called Mood Dependent Memory and is an example of affect. Affect can give us ‘information’, for example if we have a bad feeling completely unrelated to the situation, we are more likely to judge the situation on that feeling.

Lecture 2 - Social      06/02/19

Social Perception, the perceiving and understanding of others

Pareidolia; seeing faces in objects or scenarios.

When we perceive others, we don’t necessarily see them. Often, we fill in things from our memory, and thus don’t notice minor differences or changes. This is called change blindness.

Change blindness has a lot of influence on for instance witness testimonies, and their reliability.

Themes of social perception

• Nonverbal communication
• Attribution
• Impression formation and management

Nonverbal communication

Basic channels of nonverbal communication:

• Facial expressions
• Gazes and Stares
• Body language
• Touch

Paul Eckman: humans have some innate, basic facial expressions to express the 6 basic emotions, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness.

Eye gaze: humans have an advanced gaze detection system in our vision cortex. We are good at determining what people are looking at. We easily detect abnormal postures from our periphery. Our white eyes sclera help us make good assessments of what people are looking at, because it can help us determining what the person’s pupils are directed at.

However, simply faces without bodies can be quite useless. The body language can tell us which emotion the face is making.

Deception: nonverbal cues, however, are often faint and unreliable (Aldert Vrij).

Social function of emotion: Are emotions between people rather than inside individuals?

A smile can: get someone a lower punishment, get a greater customer commitment, more likely to get hired somewhere, get higher tips as a waiter.

Attributions

Judgement of attributions stable/unstable and internal/eternal. If influences are stable/internal there is an individual ability, stable/external has to do with task difficulty, unstable/internal is effort, unstable/external is just luck.

Correspondence bias is the fundamental attribution error. We tend to take a situational thing and attribute it to a person or happening as a whole. This is because; 1. We tend to focus on a person rather than a situation, therefor attribute something to a person, 2. We only have a limited perspective, there are a lot of factors we have no knowledge of and 3. We have a limited cognitive capacity.

Occasionally we do a situational correction, where we correct our attribution.

Actor/observer bias: we assume people have more choice in matters than they do.

Self-serving bias: we see ourselves more favourably, attribute positive to internal, attribute negative to external.

This is because we only have our own, individual point of reference/perspective. 

Kelley’s attribution theory;

• Consensus
• Consistency
• Distinctiveness

All three of these are high? Tis is an external cause. All three low? This is an internal cause.

Impression formation and management

We form a very quick impression of people. This we evaluate on mostly their ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’, do we like or dislike this person? We just infer certain traits of a person called central traits, which are closely associated to a lot of other traits

Implicit Personality Theory: we like to think certain traits imply that other traits are also present. We tend to pay more attention to a person’s negative traits. However, we are more likely to express positive evaluations (to seem nice and polite).

Motivate Person Perception: How we perceive others is influenced by what we want or trying to achieve. What are our goals on interacting with this person? What is our emotional state? Anticipation of a future interaction helps remember attributes and behaviour.

Impression management:

• Ingratiation: suck up to people
• Self-handicapping: Down-playing yourself

Lecture 3 – Organisational      11/02/19

Self-other discrepancy: the difference between intentions and behaviour, dependant on point of view. Often, other people are better in estimating social behaviours. We ourselves are often better at saying how often we engage in events

Can you know yourself?

Introspection: looking in yourself. But conscious access to why we behave a certain way is sometimes difficult.

Affective forecasting bias: this is 1) because an over-projection of current feelings. Because things feel very extreme right now, you will assume that you will feel the same way later, and 2) failure to consider context, which means we tend to forget other factors.

Do we want to know ourselves?

Social comparison: comparing ourselves to others (duh). We often make a comparison right away, and only later assess if that comparison is useful. For an accurate self-image, we compare ourselves with similar others. If we want to feel better about ourselves, we compare ourselves with someone less than us (downward comparison). If we want to know what we want to strive for, set goals, we compare ourselves with someone better than us (upward comparison).

When comparing ourselves with similar people, we will feel bad when someone is better at you when you care about the topic. When the topic is irrelevant, we are more likely to feel happy with their accomplishments. Similarly, we feel bad when someone individually is better than you, but if someone in a group is better but it helps the group along, we are more likely to feel good about it.

How do we define ourselves?

There are two types of identity: personal and social. Social Identity Theory says that how we identify ourselves is often based on context. It also depends on who or what we compare ourselves to. Also important is centrality. This means that things such as religion or sexuality are often more stable.

We also define ourselves based on disapproval of others. It can either result in people solving the disapproved behaviour, or social creativity, which is defiance in order to recover our self-esteem.

Basking in reflected glory: riding on the success of a group you might identify yourself with.

Cutting off reflected failure: the opposite, trying not to associate yourself with failure of a group

When is a group a group?

When there is; interaction, mutual goals or a striving to achieve a common identity.

Evolutionary explanation for groups: it is safer. Task goals: there is more knowledge and information within a group. Social goal: the need to belong somewhere.

Key components of groups

Status: External -> Between groups, resulting in pride. Internal -> Hierarchy, resulting in respect. Factors for hierarchy; 1) Characteristics such as gender, sex etc, 2) Behaviour, 3) Seniority

Roles: Formal roles: explicitly discussed, such as assistant or coffee bringer. Informal roles: Not discussed, but people take roles, such as the one always asking how everyone feels

Norms: shared expectations about what is expected of group members. The more you identify with the group, the closer you are.

Cohesiveness:  forces that makes a group stay together. Effect: joy of group and likeliness to recruit new members.

Decisions in groups

Polarisation: opinions become more extreme.

Group think: Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing opposing viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences. There is an illusion of being invulnerable.

Lecture 4 – Social      13/02/19

Lecture topic: attitudes

Attitudes are global evaluations of any aspect of our social environment. These can be good or bad, but they are basically a judgement of any and everything that happens around us.

Functions of attitudes

• Go or no? Should we do it?
• Knowledge organisation – cognitive placement.
• Identity/ selfexpression
• Egoprotection/ self-preservation (deny information that doesn’t fit or attitude)

Explicit attitudes: conscious, accessible attitudes that we control and are aware of

Implicit attitudes: unconscious associations between objects or people or situation and give evaluative response.

Implicit Association Test (IAT): tests associations between words/concepts judging on reaction time. It can indeed show prejudice, but is also dependant of mood, context and recent events

Social learning and attitudes

There are different ways of coming into a certain behaviour or attitude.

• Observational learning: learning through watching others. Especially important is family, who you not only learn behaviour from, but also attitudes and prejudices. Implicit and explicit.
• Classical conditioning: Pavlov etc. Implicit.
• Subliminal conditioning: Unaware of the conscious brain, information is stored, influencing a person’s attitude towards something. This also works in the case of exposure. The more exposed to something you are, the more strongly you will feel about something. Implicit.
• Instrumental conditioning: when a behaviour is met with a punishment/reward, it strengthens an attitude
• Social comparison: turning to others as a source of information. The more people are alike to us, the more likely we are to adopt their attitudes on a matter we know nothing of.

Attitudes and behaviour

Attitude and behaviour can mismatch. This can be because general attitudes cannot predict very specific behaviours (influenced by more than an attitude)

What leads to a behaviour?

Attitudes + subjective norms + behavioural control -> behavioural intention -> behaviour

Attitudes vary on:

• Extremity
• Certainty: The more people agree, the more certain and expressive we are of an attitude
• Action: expressing an attitude can feel like taking action, actually making them less likely to actually take action
• Personal experience
• Vested interests: does it affect you?

Attitude change

Attitude construction/maintenance. There are two ways of forming attitudes, fast and efficient, and accurate. Accurate descriptions are pro’s and cons of a situation. Fast and efficient features are also called peripheral features. Peripheral features are thing as status, ego, pleasing views. They can also be the number of arguments, a document of image’s lay out, and scientific jargon.

The easiest way to change someone’s attitude is through peripheral features.

However we do resist changes of attitudes. This happens in 3 ways. If we feel like the attitude will restrict our personal freedom, we will resist. This is the same when we know people will come and try to change our attitude – such as in a debate. And if we know, then we also just might to avoid it altogether.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when your attitude does not meet your behaviour. To get out of it, we might do one of three things. We either change the behaviour, change the attitude or simply deny that the attitude and behaviour so not match up.

Justification of effort means that we change our attitude to justify the amount the effort we put into a task.

Lecture 5 – Organisational    18/02/19

Lecture topic: Motivation

In the industrial revolution, awareness was raised for the difference between just doing your job and actually being properly motivated. Most famous experiment: Hawthorne factory in Chicago. Study in lighting in the factory and motivation. Brighter light and less light both improved production -> attention improved performance, aka motivation.

Hawthorne effect: people perform better when they get a little attention. This is important in experiments because this can be a confounding variable, meaning you have to test with a control group that there is not a Hawthorne effect taking place instead of what you are looking for.

There are three aspects in work motivation. These are effort, direction and persistence. With no motivation, effort will always be low. Direction is about focus, are you doing something relevant or not. Direction is the focus of your effort. Persistence is about not giving up after just a single speedbump.

But motivation isn’t just motivation. Performance = wanting x being able (having the skills to do it)

How strong is the link between motivation and performance?

Cerasoli, Nicklin and Ford (2014): 18% of performance = motivation

There are two types or motivation: Intrinsic and Extrinsic. Also two types of performance: quality and quantity. The question is, do you need the same type of motivation for different types of performance. When dealing with quality performance, intrinsic motivation is mostly important. With quantity, this has more to do with extrinsic.

Important with extrinsic motivation is that there is  direct link between a behaviour and the punishment/reward.

Theories of motivation

Four types of theories: Needs, Expectation, Fairness, Justice – all try to explain the processes underlying motivation.

Need: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a pyramid building up 5 needs.

You work from the bottom up, you first need to have the lowest layer to have the fourth, you need the fourth to have the third, etc.

Alderfer’s ERG theory works the same way, except there are only three categories: Existence, Relatedness and Growth.

Lecture 6 – Social   20/02/19

Lecture topic: stereotypes and prejudice

Social categorisation’s ABC (real order CAB)

• Affective: prejudice
• Behavioural: discrimination
• Cognitive: Stereotyping

Cognitive: Stereotyping

Why do we stereotype? They are social categorisations, not bad, or good, not accurate or inaccurate. They are a faster cognitive way of predicting behaviour. A stereotype is a generalisation. We exaggerate differences and disregard similarities between groups. Once information gets overly simplified, it can become a stereotype. The problem is that stereotypes often are of groups of people, but we apply them to individuals.

Behavioural: Discrimination

Zero-sum situations occur when people outside of minorities feel like they have to sacrifice part of their privilege. This is because people are loss averse. The majority is afraid that they will lose parts of their privilege of advantages and thus sink into discrimination and stereotypes to keep their control.

Objective vs subjective scales: how can we make sure a judgement does not involve a subjective prejudice.

Jane Elliot’s experiment aka the brown-blue eye experiment

Prejudice: causes

• Social learning
• Conditioning
• Realistic conflict theory; prejudice is formed by creating a realistic type of conflict people feel involved in
• Social categorisation: us vs them situations. There is an ingroup and an outgroup. As part of the ingroup, we want to keep that group to ourselves.
• Self-threat: we often have prejudices about thing that threaten our self-esteems
• Illusory correlation: when a group is smaller, we are quicker to associate them with negative events even though there is no substantial proof for it. This is because things that happen to a smaller group often seem more distinctive. Therefore, we tend to overestimate negative likelihoods.

*In bold was discussed in lecture 4

Remedies for prejudice:

• Upbringing
• Superordinate goals
• Individuation information: making sure you view someone as a person instead of a group
• Recategorization: placing people in different groups

The Contact hypothesis is that the more in contact you are with someone, the less prejudiced you become. You will start seeing more similarities, seeing more mistakes in the stereotypes and see the outgroup as more diverse. It works especially if there is: an equal status between people, there is a common goal, there is intergroup cooperation, support of authorities and actual personal interaction.

The Para-social contact hypothesis: via media such as shows, movies, social media etc.

Unlearning stereotypes is hard. Suppressing or negating them does not work

WEEK 4

Lecture 7 – Organisational     25/02/19

Lecture topic: Diversity and stress

Diversity is the human subjective opinion of what makes us different. Several things factor into this:

• Perception: how do other perceive us? This is based on three things
  • Perceiver
  • Target: ambiguity, social status, impression management. The history we have with people and the stereotypes around who we are.
  • Situation: Situational context and timing
  • Biases in perception can be formed by:
    
    • Primacy effect
    • Contrast effect -> how different are we
    • Halo effect -> How does the way we look in a certain situation compared to others affect how I come across
    • Similar-to-me effect
    • Harshness, leniency and average tendency
    • Knowledge of predictor
  • Managing diversity. This is mostly done by Impression management. Impression management consists of behavioural matching, self-promotion, conforming to situational norms, appreciating/flattering others, being consistent, all in order to make ourselves more appealing to others.

• Discrimination:  what predispositions have people about us? Sever things facto into this:
  • Social status
  • Intelligence
  • Credibility
  • Responsibility for actions

Stress

There are a lot of causes for stress, but the following are the main ones in terms of social psychology:

• Work-life balance stressors: is your relationship with your boss good/bad? Do you like the work, etc.
• Work-family conflict : can you balance the job you do with the family you have?
  
  • Things that decrease work-family conflict are: job satisfaction, organizational commitment,  life satisfaction
  • Things that increase work-family conflict are: family-related stress, work-related stress, depression, burn out
• Personal stressors. These can be organisational stressors: do you have you life/things that are important to you organised? But also environmental uncertainty, do you have access to your primal needs?
• Job-related stressors
  
  • Role conflict
  • Role ambiguity
  • Too much work (overload)
  • Not enough work (underload)

Consequences of too much stress

• Physical: Cardiovascular disease (blood pressure, cholesterol), Hormonal (cortisol, adrenalin, noradrenalin), Sleep disturbances
• Psychological : Emotions (anxiety, worries), Burnout (emotional exhaustion)
• Behavioural: Negative stress (threat, avoidance), positive stress (challenges)

Coping

There are different forms of coping:

• Emotion focused coping -> focussed on dealing with and control stressful feelings, emotions
  • Coping methods Exercise, Meditation, seek informal support, seek professional support

• Problem focused coping -> focussed on dealing directly with and act on the source of stress
  • Coping methods: Time management, role negotiation

Lecture 8 – Social     27/02/19

Lecture topic: Romantic relationships and prosocial behaviour

The need to belong

Every person has, to some extent, a desire to make and keep close relationships with other people and a need to affiliate with others. This is why social exclusion/ostracism (being excluded, rejected to ignored) is so extremely hurtful and harmful.

In result, people compensate for their loneliness, which is called social snacking. Nowadays, people go online for this, try to get likes on posts etc. We also tend to seek out company from people who feel the same as us. This means that miserable people seek out other miserable people

Rules of attraction

• The younger, the better. This is also why humans go as far as plastic surgery, because we want to seem as youthful as possible. Explanation: the younger, the more fertile
• Symmetry (especially faces) Explanation: symmetric means more healthy
• Average faces. Explanation: the more average, the more symmetric
• Repeated exposure: the more you see of a person, the more attractive you find them. This also counts for online exposure.
• Similarity: more similar individuals tend to pull more together and find each other more attractive. Mimicry: mimicking each other breeds more attractive.
• Reciprocity: you have to both like each other, obviously
• Scarcity: something more difficult to get is always more attractive
• Misattribution: Sometimes, we think we feel attraction, while in reality, we don’t. (Like the attention, isn’t attracted)

Evolution and gender differences

• Older men often want younger women with good looks -> fertility
• Women go for looks & character and money & status -> protection and care

Cheating on a partner is regardless of gender. The more power we have, the more likely infidelity is.

Evolutionary accounts are very important for us to explain odd, lingering behaviour. There are often many alternative explanations that refute evolution, because we cannot know precisely exactly what happened in the past.

Prosocial behaviour: why do people help?

• Altruism: helping for the sake of helping -> helping without any benefit to yourself at all. Does that even exist? Altruism is often explained away by reciprocity. I help you, you help me.
• Empathy increases social reward. The more similar we are to a person, the more empathy we tend to experience. It has 2 components. 1) perspective taking (cognitive) and 2) empathic concern (feeling)
• Competitive altruism means you help to increase status.
• Defensive helping means you help to avoid retaliation of another group
• Reducing own distress: you help to make sure you don’t feel bad

Our help varies on similarity, gender, attractiveness and self-focus (e. g. social class)

Obstructions of helping

• The bystander effect: The more people around, the less likely it is that someone will help.
  • Pluralistic ignorance: we interpret a situation differently (assume you’re right when everybody seems to interpret it the same)
  • Diffusion of responsibility
• Billable hours: aka time pressure. Helping takes time and people don’t want to afford time
• Moral dilemma: What is expected of us? (For instance: the Trolley problem)
  
  • Stereotype content model: some people are better victims that others.
• Moral licensing: Past good actions give licence to compensation with less moral things, trying to maintain a moral balance.

WEEK 5

Lecture 9 – Organisational   04/03/19

Lecture topic: Power, politics, conflict and negotiation.

Power

 Power is the ability to make someone else do something they otherwise maybe wouldn’t do. Power in itself is extremely necessary for achieving organisational goals. Therefore it is often called a necessary evil. It can lead to competition, better decision making, coalition building and positive change.

There are two types of power; formal and informal.

Formal power depends on a couple things. Legitimacy is also called legal power – you have the right to do something. Reward power is the ability to rewards or promote someone. Coercion is related to punishment, the power to fire or punish you. Information power is related to who knows more and thus have more responsibility. Formal power is related to extrinsic motivation.

Informal power: expert power, having a talent or being good at what you do. This is also related to scarcity. If you are one of the few to do something, you power is greater. Role model power – are you a role model to someone, then you  have responsibility and power. Personality power is also called charismatic power. It is when you have the charisma to make people believe you have the power to change things. Informal power is related to intrinsic motivation.

Consequences of power: cognitive, affective, behavioural

Cognitive: big difference in perspective taking between high and low power. People with high power tend to be more self-oriented. People with more power also tend to stereotype more. People with power often also learn from their mistakes more and tend to think more abstractly.

Affective: people with high power have more to testosterone, thus tend to be quicker angered. Powerlessness is more related to cortisol and stress. People with high power express more positive than negative emotions, defend own opinion more, perceive less threat and more positive opportunities.

Behaviour: power is associated with more action oriented behaviour such as; prioritising tasks, goal oriented behaviour, optimism, and more risk taking.

Power is a circle. Powered people see more things from their own perspective and get things done because of their power and thus gain more power. Powerless is the opposite circle.

Politics

Work can serve as a base of power for some people. Jobs that provide power are often related to; problem solving, irreplaceability, central activity and control over resources.

How to gain power? You can;

• Exploit your expert power
• Form coalitions with powerful people.
• Make yourself irreplaceable
• Control the agenda
• Recognise power

Conflict

Happens when people/divisions within organisation have opposing goals. Two types; task conflict and relationship conflict.

Within task conflict there is;

• Task interdependence – common goals or not?
• Overlapping authority
• Incompatible evaluation systems

Task conflict isn’t always bad. With an optimal level, it can improve performance.

Within relationship conflict there is ;

• Different insights – different ways of doing tasks
• Lack of status or acknowledgement

Negotiation.

Usual pattern: Initial offer –> counter offer –> concessions -> compromise.

When negotiating and wanting a most integrative potential, focus on;

• Focus on common goals
• Focus on the problem
• Seek the other party’s needs
• Go for win/win
• Be honest

Lecture 10 – Social      07/03/19

Lecture topic: social influence

Social influence are the attempts of one or more individuals to change the attitudes, beliefs, points of view or behaviour of one or more other individuals. This can be both conscious and unconscious.

Cohesiveness is the degree to which attraction felt by an individual toward some group, group size, and type of social norm operating in that situation. This also determines how much influence the group has on said individual.

People tend to change their attitudes or behaviour to adapt to the existing social norms

Different types of social behaviour

• Normative social influence: the desire to be liked by others
• Informational social influence: the desire to be right or accurate, and thus perceived as knowledgeable
• Social norm: the implicit/ explicit rules of action in specific situations and interactions
• Descriptive norm: describes what most people do in a given situation
• Injunctive norm: specifies how people should behave in a given situation

The two types of rule-following behaviour

Compliance: when a person gives direct requests to another person to receive a positive or desired reaction

• Foot-in-the-door technique: presenting target people with a small request, following up with a larger request.
• Lowball procedure: After acceptance of good offer, something appears to happen that makes it necessary for the salesperson to change the deal and make it less advantageous for the customer, however because the customer said yes the first time, the new offer is harder to refuse now.
• Door-in-the-face: starting with a very large request and then, after this is rejected, shift to a smaller request, appearing to make an effort to accommodate to the other person
• Playing hard to get and the deadline technique: based on the principle of scarcity, where what is scarce or hard to obtain is seen as valuable
• Scarcity: Seems very exclusive and/or elite, thus seeming desirable

Resistance of compliance

• Individuality (reactance, uniqueness)
• Personal control (i.e., power)
• Bystander(s) (break consensus)

Obedience: when one or more individuals demand of others to behave in a certain way and these demands are followed without question. Things that affect the level of obedience are:

• Explanation for existence: the orders seem to make perfect logical sense
• Transfer of responsibility: because the order was giving my someone else, it diffuses responsibility
• Gradual escalation: like the foot in the door, it slowly gets worse
• Time pressure
• Authority

Resistance to obedience

• Disobedient models (minority influence)
• Question expertise/motives (of authority)
• Awareness of the influence (of authority)

WEEK 6

Lecture 11 – Organisational      11/03/19

Lecture topic: groups and teams

When is a group a group?

Book definition: A set of two or more people who interact with each other to achieve certain goals or meet certain needs

Social identity theory: if two or more people see themselves as a group.

Why do we join a group?

• Task goals > others have more information or knowledge, or doing something together
• Psychological goals > The need to belong or self-esteem of status

Types of groups

Within an organisation, there are two types, formal and informal work groups. Formal work groups are established by the organisation’s management. Informal groups are created by members.

These groups develop in 5 stages

• Forming: getting to know each other until everyone feels they belong
• Storming: conflict about the leadership and control > ends when control is established
• Norming: connecting plans and common goals
• Performing: working together to achieve the goals
• Adjourning: the group gets disbanded

However, these phases do not always end or in the right order.

Another schema only has two stages: ‘wasting time’ aka social goals -> performance aka task goals. Usually, people spend 50% of the time in either of the stages.

When a group is presented with a newcomer, one of two things can happen. Socialisation: the newcomer adjusts to the group and accommodation: the group adjusts to the newcomer.

Characteristics of groups

• Size. In a large group, the advantages are that there is more knowledge, an easier division of labour, and more and easier  specialisation. The advantages of small groups are that sharing information is easier, more interaction, individual contributions are clearer, a stronger identification and there is more satisfaction.
• Function
• Efficacy
• Status. A higher status more often leads to more cheating and dishonest behaviour. People do a lot to keep their status. This can, for instance, lead to fraud.
• Composition aka how heterogenous should a group be? In a more homogenous group, there are less coordination issues, there is more sharing of information, less conflict and people feel more connected to each other. In a heterogenous group there is more diverse input, which leads to better decisions and a better performance.
• Facilitation

Group norms

Formal norms: these are formal rules that are officially written down

Informal norms: ‘undiscussed’ agreements within a group.

Norms can communicate identity and opinion. But why do people conform to certain norms?

• Compliance: doing it because toy have to
• Identification: because you care about the group that has the norm
• Internalisation: because you want to conform to the norms

A deviant does not conform to these formal or informal normal. This can be in both a positive and negative way. This is also very dependant on environment. Generally, for maximum group performance, you want a mid-level of conformity and deviance. When people do not conform to the norm, you can:

• Adjust the norm
• Try to change the deviant
• Exclude the deviant

Group performance

When the group is watching you do an easy task, it results in a better performance, aka social facilitations.

When the group is watching you do a new or hard task, it results in a bad performance, aka social inhibition.

When working in a group, the individual effort/performance decreases the larger group becomes. This is called the Ringelmann effect or process loss. This is either because if coordination loss (you don’t time the task correctly for example) or motivation loss.

Performance in cooperation often depends on the importance of the tasks and the other person’s efforts. When working on an important task with a weak partner, people tend to work a lot harder to compensate. When working on an important task with a strong partner, people tend to work a lot less hard. This is called loafing.

The sucker effect is when your partner performs below standard, you lower your own performance to avoid being taken advantage of.

Lecture 12 – Organisational     13/03/19

Lecture topic: employment relationships and organisation culture

Performance appraisal can be fairly difficult. There are two goals; motivating and evaluating. Crucial is the accuracy of the appraisal, and it is hard not to be influenced by trivial things by for instance appearance.

Character and personality traits, as well as behaviour or results without context are not completely fair to be judged on individually. Therefore, a performance appraisal should be made on a combination of all the above aspects. It is also important to leave out biases and stereotypes, such as that men are assertive and women very caring.

When rewarding someone for their good work, the two most straightforward options seen to be salary/bonusses or help in someone’s career. However, giving people more money does not always increase someone’s performance. However, the issue with salary and bonusses it that the quantity performance goes up but the quality decreases. The amount of risk-taking increases, but when things go wrong, someone else has to pick up the mess.

The problem with helping someone’s career is that here is not always an option of promotion. In a linear career, one actually steps up closer to the dream job every time. A spiral career means you step up but not in the same profession. A transitory career means you just switch jobs without going higher up and a steady state career, you simply commit to one profession for the rest of your career, such as a family-doctor.

Types of people in a company

There are generally two types of workers, career-tigers and team players. Career tigers tend to be more focussed at achieving more in their career, while team players are often more concerned with their co-workers and the attitude in work. However, for a company, team players are often more valuable, because they tend to work harder, perform better, and are often more loyal to the company.

Organisational culture

Shared values beliefs norms that influence the way employees think, feel and behave towards each other and outside of the company.

There are two types of values; instrumental, concrete such as being helpful or keeping up with traditions, and terminal, which are more abstract, things the company strives for.

The culture within a company is kept through socialisation – newcomers adopt the norms and values of the company -, stories and ceremonies and language – the way people speak but also dress or travel, things that are usual within the company.

Things that shape organisational culture;

• Characteristics of people in the organisation
• Organisational ethics
• Employment relationship: possibilities for an employee to grow, to get paid and focus on length of employment.
• Organisational structure

WEEK  7

Lecture 13 – Social  18/03/19

Lecture topic: antisocial behaviour

Aggression: any behaviour intended to do physical or psychological harm.

Theories

• Freud: two instinctual forces -> life and death forces. Aggression is an instinct/natural evolution
• The drive theory: any condition that creates frustration and this triggers the drive to remove obstacles.
• Social learning: growing up and environment
• General aggression model: situation x individual -> aggression. This is affected by arousal, emotions and cognition

Aggression factors

• Frustration is a big cause of aggression. However frustration will not always lead to aggression. It can also lead to sadness, depression, or other emotions.
• Provocation: provocation can work both ways. One can say or do something to provoke a person, and one can also interpret things as a provocation or not
• Social rejection: leads to a hostile bias. One will be quicker to interpret something as hostile of provocative.
• Excitation transfer: one type arousal can result into application of that arousal to a completely unrelated situation that follows
• Violent media
• Ego: narcissists have an over-inflated self-esteem -> threat to self-esteem tends to result in aggression
• Gender: under stress, men display fight-or-flight, women display tend-and-befriend. Men are also more direct and physical and women more indirect and vocal.

What increases display of aggression?

• The weapons effect: the availability of ways to aggress/kill increases intention and aggression
• Unpleasant environment: such as noises, smells, people. The less we are used to the environment and feel uncomfortable/aroused by it, we get more frustrated.
• Alcohol and stimulating drugs

Antisocial behaviours

Antisocial behaviour is any behaviour that is disruptive or harmful to the wellbeing or property of another person -> cheating, lying, stealing.

Lecture 14 – Organisational            20/03/19

Lecture topic: Leaders and leadership

Leadership substitutes are factors that reduce the need for actual leadership.

Leadership neutralisers are factors that reduce the ability of leaders to exert any influence

Formal leaders are given the authority by the organisation to influence and affect the members, while informal leaders do not have any formal authority, but are rather chosen by the members of the organisation.

A leader controls, informs, supports and motivates subordinates.

Types of leaders pt.1

• Task oriented leaders: focussed on getting the work done
• Relationship-oriented leaders: focussed on creating a nice atmosphere

Fiedler contingency theory: Effectivity leader = person x situation (task structure, relationship and power)

The path-goal theory: finding out what motivates subordinates and what their goal is and then rewards for a strong performance by the use of showing them the path to that goal.

Motivating leadership behaviours:

• Directive
• Supportive
• Participative
• Achievementoriented

Types of leaders pt. 2 (Vroom & Yetton)

• Autocratic leaders > don’t ask for input
• Consultative > ask for help but the leader makes final decision
• Group > group makes the decision
• Delegated > individuals make their own decisions

Leader-Member Exchange theory

Instead of a one-way relationship, sometimes the relationship is two way. The follower listens to the leader, but the leader also listens to what the follower has to say. This bond doesn’t occur with everybody, only with select followers who do then become part of the in-group.