Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition) a summary
- 10443 keer gelezen
Organizational Behavior
Chapter 3
Perceiving ourselves and others in organizations
Self-concept: an individual’s self-beliefs and self-evaluations.
Defined at three levels:
Specifically, we view ourselves in terms of our personal traits (individual), connections to friends and coworkers (relational)and memberships in entities (collective).
Self-concept complexity, consistency and clarity
An individual’s self-concept can be described by three characteristics
Effects of self-concept characteristics on well-being and behavior
People tend to have better psychological well-being when they have fairly distinct multiple selves (complexity), that are well established (clarity) and require similar personal attributes that are compatible with the individual’s character (consistency).
Self-concept complexity protects our self-esteem when some roles are threatened or damaged.
People tend to have better well-being when their multiple selves are in harmony with each other with the individual’s personality and values.
Also increases with clarity.
Self-concept has opposing effects on individual behavior and performance.
Employees with complex identities tend to have more adaptive decision making and performance.
Self-concept complexity often produces more diverse social networks.
Highly complex self-concepts require more effort to maintain and juggle, which can be stressful.
Self-concept clarity tends to improve performance and its considered vital for leadership roles.
Provides a clearer path forward.
Feel less threatened by interpersonal conflict.
But: inflexibility
Self-enhancement
A person’s inherent motivation to have a positive self-concept (and to others perceive him or her favorably) such as being competent, attractive, lucky, ethical and important.
Observed in many ways
But, people rate themselves above average only for things that are important to them and that are relatively common.
Self-enhancement,
Self-verification
A person’s inherent motivation to confirm and maintain his or her existing self-concept.
Employees actively communicate their self-concept so coworkers understand it and provide verifying feedback.
Self-verification includes seeking feedback that is not necessarily flattering.
Self-verification is associated with several OB topics
Self-evaluation
Defined by three elements:
Self-esteem
The extend to which people like, respect and are satisfied with themselves.
Represents a global self-evaluation.
People have degrees of self-esteem for each of their various roles. From these multiple self-appraisals, people form an overall evaluation of themselves, → their global self-esteem.
People with high self-esteem are less influenced by others, tend to persist in spite of failure, and have a higher propensity to think logically.
Self-efficacy
A person’s belief about successfully completing a task.
Those with high self-efficacy have a ‘can-do’ attitude. Often task specific.
People have a general self-efficacy when they belief they can be successful across a variety of situations.
People whit higher general self-efficacy have a more positive overall self-evaluation.
Locus of control
A person’s general beliefs about the amount of control he or she has over personal life events.
Individuals with an internal locus of control belief that life events are caused mainly by their personal characteristics.
A generalized belief, but this belief varies to some extent with the situation.
People with an internal locus of control have a more positive self-evaluation. They also tend to perform better in most employment situations, are more successful in their careers, earn more money, and are better suited for leadership positions.
The social self
Social identity theory: a theory that people define themselves by the groups to which they belong or have an emotional attachment.
Social identity is a complex combination of many memberships arranged in a hierarchy of importance.
Determining importance:
All of us try to balance our personal and social identities, but the priority of uniqueness (personal identities) versus belongingness (social identities) differs from one person to the next.
Expressing disagreement with others is a sign of distinctiveness and can help employees form a clear self-concept, particularly when that disagreement is based on differences in personal values.
Perception: the process of receiving information about and making sense of the world around us.
Determining which information to notice, as well as how to categorize and interpret it withing the framework of our existing knowledge.
Selective attention: the process of attending to some information received by our senses and ignoring other information.
Influenced by characteristics of the person or object being perceived. Also by context. Characteristics of the perceiver also influence selective attention, usually without the perceivers awareness.
When information is received through the senses, our brain quickly and non-consciously assesses whether it is relevant or irrelevant to us and then attaches emotional markers to the retained information.
Emotional markers help us store information in memory. Those emotions are later reproduced when recalling the perceived information.
Selective attention problems:
Perceptual organization and interpretations
We pay attention to a tiny fraction of the stimuli received by the senses. Even so, the human brain further reduces the huge volume and complexity of the information received through various perceptual grouping strategies.
Perceptual grouping occurs mostly without our awareness, yet it is the foundation for making sense of things and fulfilling our need for cognitive closure.
Another form of perceptual grouping involves filling in missing information.
Or when we think we see trends in otherwise ambiguous information.
Along with perceptual grouping, making sense of the world around us involves interpreting information.
This happens as quickly as selecting and organizing because the previously mentioned emotional markers are tagged to incoming stimuli, which are essentially quick judgments about whether information is good or bad to us.
Mental models
Knowledge structures that we develop to describe, explain and predict the world around us.
They consist of visual or relational images in our mind.
Rely on the process of perceptual grouping to make sense of things. They fill in the missing pieces, including the causal connection among events.
Important for sense making, yet they also make it difficult to see the world in different ways.
The most important way to minimize the perceptual problems with mental models is to be aware of and frequently question them. We need to ask ourselves about the assumptions we make.
Working with people from diverse backgrounds is another way to break out of existing mental models.
Stereotyping in organizations
Stereotyping: the process of assigning traits to people based on their membership in a social category.
Shared beliefs across an entire society and sometimes across several cultures.
Why people stereotype
The combination of social-identity and self-enhancement leads to the processes of:
Problems with stereotyping
Stereotyping distorts perceptions in various ways
Most of this perceptual bias occurs at unintentional (systemic) discrimination whereby decision makers rely on stereotypes to establish notions to he ‘ideal’ person in specific roles.
Implicit, automatic and unintentional
Intentional discrimination or prejudice.
People hold unfounded negatived attitudes toward people belonging to a particular stereotyped group.
Deliberate
Attribution theory
Attribution process: the perceptual process of deciding whether an observed behavior or event is caused largely by internal or external factors.
Three attribution rules
The attribution process is important because understanding cause-effect relationships enables us to work more effectively with others and to assign praise or blame to them.
We react differently to attributions of our own behavior and performance.
Attribution errors
We are strongly motivated to assign internal or external attributions to someone’s behavior, but hits perceptual process is also susceptible to errors.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Our perceptions can influence reality.
Contingencies of self-fulfilling prophecy
The self-fulfilling prophecy effect is stronger in some situations than in others.
It has a stronger effect at the beginning of a relationship.
It is stronger when several people hold the same expectations of the individual.
It is stronger among people with a history of low achievement, these people tend to have a low self-esteem, so they are easily influenced by others.
Positive organizational behavior: a perspective of organizational behavior that focuses on building positive qualities and traits within individuals or institutions as opposed to focusing on what is wrong with them.
Other perceptual effects
Four additional biases:
Halo effect
A perceptual error whereby our general impression of a person, usually based on one prominent characteristic, colors our perception of other characteristics of that person.
Most likely to occur when important information about the perceived target is missing or we are not sufficiently motivated to search for it.
False-consensus effect
A perceptual error in which we overestimate the extent to which others have beliefs and characteristics similar to our own.
Explanations
We are comforted believing that others are similar to us, particularly regarding less acceptable or diverse behavior
We interact more with people who have similar views and behaviors
We are more likely to remember information that is consistent with our own views and selectively screen out information that is contrary to our beliefs
Our social identity process homogenizes people withing groups
Primacy effect
A perceptual error in which we quickly form an opinion of people based on the first information we receive about them.
First impressions are lasting impressions
Recency effect
A perceptual error which the recent information dominates our perception of others.
Most common when people make a decision involving complex information.
Three potentially effective ways.
Awareness of perceptual biases
Can reduce the biases to some extent by making people more mindful of their thoughts and actions.
But it has only limited effect.
Improving self-awareness
Tends to reduce perceptual biases by making people more open-minded and nonjudgmental toward others.
Meaningful interaction
Any activity in which people engage in valued activities.
Contact hypotheses: a theory that the more we interact with someone, the less prejudiced or perceptually biased we will be against that person.
Meaningful interaction is the strongest when people work closely and frequently with each other on a shared goal that requires mutual cooperation and reliance. Everyone should have equal status in that context, should be engaged in a meaningful task, and should have positive experiences with each other in those interactions.
Meaningful interaction reduces dependence on stereotypes because we gain better knowledge about individuals and experience their unique attributes in action.
It potentially improves empathy toward others.
Empathizing reduces attribution errors by improving our sensitivity to the external causes of another person’s performance and behavior.
BUT
Trying to emphasize with others without spending time with them might actually increase rather than reduce stereotyping and other perceptual biases.
Global mindset: an individuals ability to perceive, appreciate, and emphasize with people from other cultures, and to process complex cross-cultural information.
Includes:
Developing a global mindset
Involves improving one’s perceptions.
It begins with self-awareness
Develops through better knowledge of people and cultures
Join with a free account for more service, or become a member for full access to exclusives and extra support of WorldSupporter >>
This is a summary of the book Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S (8th edition). This book is about psychology at the workplace. It contains for instance ways to increase employee satisfaction and workplace dynamics. The book is used in the course 'Labor and and
...There are several ways to navigate the large amount of summaries, study notes en practice exams on JoHo WorldSupporter.
Do you want to share your summaries with JoHo WorldSupporter and its visitors?
Main summaries home pages:
Main study fields:
Business organization and economics, Communication & Marketing, Education & Pedagogic Sciences, International Relations and Politics, IT and Technology, Law & Administration, Medicine & Health Care, Nature & Environmental Sciences, Psychology and behavioral sciences, Science and academic Research, Society & Culture, Tourisme & Sports
Main study fields NL:
JoHo can really use your help! Check out the various student jobs here that match your studies, improve your competencies, strengthen your CV and contribute to a more tolerant world
9046 | 5 |
Business สิรนุช contributed on 06-01-2020 08:22
For Education
Human behavior management Jessie tolledo contributed on 01-02-2020 15:19
For my assignment
Psychology Moira contributed on 29-02-2020 20:56
Study
Study Yousef Nawafleh contributed on 29-09-2021 08:08
Study
Organizational Behaviour MELANIE SIMMONS contributed on 10-09-2022 23:08
For class teaching
Add new contribution