Conceptual model of organization behaviour;
Organizational studies encompass the study of organizations from multiple viewpoints, methods, and levels of analysis. For instance, one textbook divides these multiple viewpoints into three perspectives: modern, symbolic, and postmodern. Another traditional distinction, present especially in American academia, is between the study of "micro" organizational behaviour — which refers to individual and group dynamics in an organizational setting — and "macro" strategic management and organizational theory which studies whole organizations and industries, how they adapt, and the strategies, structures and contingencies that guide them. To this distinction, some scholars have added an interest in "meso" scale structures - power, culture, and the networks of individuals and i.e. ronit units in organizations — and "field" level analysis which study how whole populations of organizations interact.
Whenever people interact in organizations, many factors come into play. Modern organizational studies attempt to understand and model these factors. Like all modernist social sciences, organizational studies seek to control, predict, and explain. There is some controversy over the ethics of controlling workers' behavior, as well as the manner in which workers are treated (see Taylor's scientific management approach compared to the human relations movement of the 1940s). As such, organizational behaviour or OB (and its cousin, Industrial psychology) have at times been accused of being the scientific tool of the powerful. Those accusations notwithstanding, OB can play a major role in organizational development, enhancing organizational performance, as well as individual and group performance/satisfaction/commitment.
One of the main goals of organizational theorists is, according to Simms (1994) "to revitalize organizational theory and develop a better conceptualization of organizational life." An organizational theorist should carefully consider levels assumptions being made in theory, and is concerned to help managers and administrators.
Organizational behaviour is a growing field. Organizational studies departments generally form part of business schools, although many universities also have industrial psychology and industrial economics programs.
The field is highly influential in the business world with practitioners such as Peter Drucker and Peter Senge, who turned the academic research into business practices. Organizational behaviour is becoming more important in the global economy as people with diverse backgrounds and cultural values must work together effectively and efficiently. It is also under increasing criticism as a field for its ethnocentric and pro-capitalist assumptions.
During the last 20 years, organizational behavior study and practice has developed and expanded through creating integrations with other domains:
Anthropology became an interesting prism to understanding firms as communities, by introducing concepts like Organizational culture, 'organizational rituals' and 'symbolic acts' enabling new ways to understand organizations as communities.
Leadership Understanding: the crucial role of leadership at various levels of an organization in the process of change management.
Ethics and their importance as pillars of any vision and one of the most important driving forces in an organization.
Aesthetics: Within the last decades a field emerged that focuses on the aesthetic sphere of our existence in organizations,[5] drawing on interdisciplinary theories and methods from the humanities and disciplines such as theatre studies, literature, music, visual studies and many more.[6]
The individual processes –
personality,
"Personality" can be defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, emotions,interpersonal orientations motivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word "personality" originates from the Latin persona, which means mask.
Personality theories
The study of personality is based on the essential insight that all people are similar in some ways, yet different in others. For example, all people learn, yet people learn different things, in different ways, and to different extents. There have been many different definitions of personality proposed. Most contemporary psychologists though would agree on the following definition:
Personality is that pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguishes one person from another and that persists over time and situations.
Trait theories
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, personality traits are "enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself that are exhibited in a wide range of social and personal contexts." Theorists generally assume a) traits are relatively stable over time, b) traits differ among individuals (for instance, some people are outgoing while others are reserved), and c) traits influence behavior. When people are describing a person, they constantly talk about traits to help define the person as a whole. Traits are relatively constant; they do not usually change. Traits are also bipolar; they vary along a continuum between one extreme and the other (e.g. friendly vs. unfriendly).
The most common models of traits incorporate three to five broad dimensions or factors. All trait theories incorporate at least two dimensions, extraversion and neuroticism, which historically featured in Hippocrates' humoral theory.
Gordon Allport delineated different kinds of traits, which he also called dispositions. Central traits are basic to an individual's personality, while secondary traits are more peripheral. Common traits are those recognized within a culture and thus may vary from culture to culture. Cardinal traits are those by which an individual may be strongly recognized. In his book, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, Gordon Allport (1937) both established personality psychology as a legitimate intellectual discipline and introduced the first of the modern trait theories.
Raymond Cattell's research propagated a two-tiered personality structure with sixteen "primary factors" (16 Personality Factors) and five "secondary factors." In Cattell's lengthy career, he had written 50 books, 500 journals, and 30 different types of standardized tests. For Cattell, personality itself was defined in terms of behavioral prediction. He defined personality as ‘‘that which permits a prediction of what a person will do in a given situation.’’
John Gittinger's theory and its applications (the Personality Assessment System (PAS)) uses the Wechsler intelligence tests, which are well standardized and objective instruments rather than self-report tests. PAS factors out personality traits (primitivity) and two additional levels, Basid and Surface, which are adaptations by environmentally induced presses and learning. Gittinger's multivariate personality descriptions exceed 500 data-based outcome descriptions.
Hans Eysenck believed just three traits—extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism—were sufficient to describe human personality. Differences between Cattell and Eysenck emerged due to preferences for different forms of factor analysis, with Cattell using oblique, Eysenck orthogonal rotation to analyze the factors that emerged when personality questionnaires were subjected to statistical analysis. Today, the Big Five factors have the weight of a considerable amount of empirical research behind them, building on the work of Cattell and others. Eysenck, along with another contemporary in trait psychology named J. P. Guilford (1959), believed that the resultant trait factors obtained from factor analysis should be statistically independent of one another —that is, the factors should be arranged (rotated) so that they are uncorrelated or orthogonal (at right angles) to one another.
Lewis Goldberg proposed a five-dimension personality model, nicknamed the "Big Five":
Openness to Experience: the tendency to be imaginative, independent, and interested in variety vs. practical, conforming, and interested in routine.
Conscientiousness: the tendency to be organized, careful, and disciplined vs. disorganized, careless, and impulsive.
Extraversion: the tendency to be sociable, fun-loving, and affectionate vs. retiring, somber, and reserved.
Agreeableness: the tendency to be softhearted, trusting, and helpful vs. ruthless, suspicious, and uncooperative.
Neuroticism: the tendency to be calm, secure, and self-satisfied vs. anxious, insecure, and self-pitying
The Big Five contain important dimensions of personality. However, some personality researchers
argue that this list of major traits is not exhaustive. Some support has been found for two additional factors: excellent/ordinary and evil/decent. However, no definitive conclusions have been established.
Type theories
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of people. Personality types are distinguished from personality traits, which come in different levels or degrees. For example, according to type theories, there are two types of people, introverts and extroverts. According to trait theories, introversion and extroversion are part of a continuous dimension, with many people in the middle. The idea of psychological types originated in the theoretical work of Carl Jung and William Marston, whose work is reviewed in Dr. Travis Bradberry's Self-Awareness. Jung's seminal 1921 book on the subject is available in English as Psychological Types.
Building on the writings and observations of Jung, during World War II, Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine C. Briggs, delineated personality types by constructing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Briggs and Myers also added another personality dimension to their type indicator to measure whether a person prefers to use a judging or perceiving function when interacting with the external world. Therefore they included questions designed to indicate whether someone wishes to come to conclusions (judgment) or to keep options open (perception).
This personality typology has some aspects of a trait theory: it explains people's behaviour in terms of opposite fixed characteristics. In these more traditional models, the sensing/intuition preference is considered the most basic, dividing people into "N" (intuitive) or "S" (sensing) personality types. An "N" is further assumed to be guided either by thinking or feeling, and divided into the "NT" (scientist, engineer) or "NF" (author, humanitarian) temperament. An "S", by contrast, is assumed to be guided more by the judgment/perception axis, and thus divided into the "SJ" (guardian, traditionalist) or "SP" (performer, artisan) temperament. These four are considered basic, with the other two factors in each case (including always extraversion/introversion) less important. Critics of this traditional view have observed that the types can be quite strongly stereotyped by professions (although neither Myers nor Keirsey engaged in such stereotyping in their type descriptions, and thus may arise more from the need to categorize people for purposes of guiding their career choice. This among other objections led to the emergence of the five-factor view, which is less concerned with behavior under work conditions and more concerned with behavior in personal and emotional circumstances. (It should be noted, however, that the MBTI is not designed to measure the "work self", but rather what Myers and McCaulley called the "shoes-off self." Some critics have argued for more or fewer dimensions while others have proposed entirely different theories (often assuming different definitions of "personality").
Type A and Type B personality theory: During the 1950s, Meyer Friedman and his co-workers defined what they called Type A and Type B behavior patterns. They theorized that intense, hard-driving Type A personalities had a higher risk of coronary disease because they are "stress junkies." Type B people, on the other hand, tended to be relaxed, less competitive, and lower in risk. There was also a Type AB mixed profile.
John L. Holland's RIASEC vocational model, commonly referred to as the Holland Codes, stipulates that six personality types lead people to choose their career paths. In this circumplex model, the six types are represented as a hexagon, with adjacent types more closely related than those more distant. The model is widely used in vocational counseling.
The first section of the profile reports results on six General Occupational Themes:
Eduard Spranger's personality-model, consisting of six (or, by some revisions, 6 +1) basic types of value attitudes, described in his book Types of Men (Lebensformen; Halle (Saale): Niemeyer, 1914; English translation by P. J. W. Pigors - New York: G. E. Stechert Company, 1928).
Behaviorist theories
Behaviorists explain personality in terms of the effects external stimuli have on behavior. It was a radical shift away from Freudian philosophy. This school of thought was developed by B. F. Skinner who put forth a model which emphasized the mutual interaction of the person or "the organism" with its environment. Skinner believed children do bad things because the behavior obtains attention that serves as a reinforcer. For example: a child cries because the child's crying in the past has led to attention. These are the response, and consequences. The response is the child crying, and the attention that child gets is the reinforcing consequence. According to this theory, people's behavior is formed by processes such as operant conditioning. Skinner put forward a "three term contingency model" which helped promote analysis of behavior based on the "Stimulus - Response - Consequence Model" in which the critical question is: "Under which circumstances or antecedent 'stimuli' does the organism engage in a particular behavior or 'response', which in turn produces a particular 'consequence'?"
Richard Herrnstein extended this theory by accounting for attitudes and traits. An attitude develops as the response strength (the tendency to respond) in the presences of a group of stimuli become stable. Rather than describing conditionable traits in non-behavioral language, response strength in a given situation accounts for the environmental portion. Herrstein also saw traits as having a large genetic or biological component as do most modern behaviorists.
Ivan Pavlov is another notable influence. He is well known for his classical conditioning experiments involving dogs. These physiological studies led him to discover the foundation of behaviorism as well as classical conditioning.
Social cognitive theories
In cognitive theory, behavior is explained as guided by cognitions (e.g. expectations) about the world, especially those about other people. Cognitive theories are theories of personality that emphasize cognitive processes such as thinking and judging.
Albert Bandura, a social learning theorist suggested the forces of memory and emotions worked in conjunction with environmental influences. Bandura was known mostly for his "Bobo Doll experiment". During these experiments, Bandura video taped a college student kicking and verbally abusing a bobo doll. He then showed this video to a class of kindergarten children who were getting ready to go out to play. When they entered the play room, they saw bobo dolls, and some hammers. The people observing these children at play saw a group of children beating the doll. He called this study and his findings observational learning, or modeling.
Early examples of approaches to cognitive style are listed by Baron (1982).[24] These include Witkin's (1965) work on field dependency, Gardner's (1953) discovering people had consistent preference for the number of categories they used to categorise heterogeneous objects, and Block and Petersen's (1955) work on confidence in line discrimination judgments. Baron relates early development of cognitive approaches of personality to ego psychology. More central to this field have been:
Attributional style theory dealing with different ways in which people explain events in their lives. This approach builds upon locus of control, but extends it by stating we also need to consider whether people attribute to stable causes or variable causes, and to global causes or specific causes.
Various scales have been developed to assess both attributional style and locus of control. Locus of control scales include those used by Rotter and later by Duttweiler, the Nowicki and Strickland (1973) Locus of Control Scale for Children and various locus of control scales specifically in the health domain, most famously that of Kenneth Wallston and his colleagues, The Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale. Attributional style has been assessed by the Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Expanded Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Attributions Questionnaire, the Real Events Attributional Style Questionnaire and the Attributional Style Assessment Test.
Achievement style theory focuses upon identification of an individual's Locus of Control tendency, such as by Rotter's evaluations, and was found by Cassandra Bolyard Whyte to provide valuable information for improving academic performance of students. Individuals with internal control tendencies are likely to persist to better academic performance levels, presenting an achievement personality, according to Cassandra B. Whyte.
Recognition that the tendency to believe that hard work and persistence often results in attainment of life and academic goals has influenced formal educational and counseling efforts with students of various ages and in various settings since the 1970s research about achievement. Counseling aimed toward encouraging individuals to design ambitious goals and work toward them, with recognition that there are external factors that may impact, often results in the incorporation of a more positive achievement style by students and employees, whatever the setting, to include higher education, workplace, or justice programming.
Walter Mischel (1999) has also defended a cognitive approach to personality. His work refers to "Cognitive Affective Units", and considers factors such as encoding of stimuli, affect, goal-setting, and self-regulatory beliefs. The term "Cognitive Affective Units" shows how his approach considers affect as well as cognition.
The authors identified five cognitive-affective units:
Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) is another cognitive personality theory. Developed by Seymour Epstein, CEST argues that humans operate by way of two independent information processing systems: experiential system and rational system. The experiential system is fast and emotion-driven. The rational system is slow and logic-driven. These two systems interact to determine our goals, thoughts, and behavior.
Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s. From the theory, Kelly derived a psychotherapy approach and also a technique called The Repertory Grid Interview that helped his patients to uncover their own "constructs" (defined later) with minimal intervention or interpretation by the therapist. The Repertory Grid was later adapted for various uses within organizations, including decision-making and interpretation of other people's world-views. From his 1963 book, A Theory of Personality, pp. 103–104:
values and attitude,
A personal value is extremely absolute or relative ethical value, the assumption of which can be the basis for ethical action. A value system is a set of consistent values and measures. A principle value is a foundation upon which other values and measures of integrity are based. Those values which are not physiologically determined and normally considered objective, such as a desire to avoid physical pain, seek pleasure, etc., are considered subjective, vary across individuals and cultures and are in many ways aligned with belief and belief systems. Types of values include ethical/moral value, doctrinal/ideological (religious, political) values, social values, and aesthetic values. It is debated whether some values which are not clearly physiologically determined are intrinsic such as altruism and whether some such as acquisitiveness should be valued as vices or virtues. Values have typically been studied in sociology, anthropology, social psychology, moral philosophy, and business ethics.
Values can be defined as broad preferences concerning appropriate courses of action or outcomes. As such, values reflect a person’s sense of right and wrong or what “ought” to be. “Equal rights for all”, "Excellence deserves admiration", and “People should be treated with respect and dignity” are representative of values. Values tend to influence attitudes and behavior. For example, if you value equal rights for all and you go to work for an organization that treats its managers much better than it does its workers, you may form the attitude that the company is an unfair place to work; consequently, you may not produce well or may perhaps leave the company. It is likely that if the company had a more egalitarian policy, your attitude and behaviors would have been more positive.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory
Geert Hofstede's theory of cultural dimensions describes the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members, and how these values relate to behavior, using a structure derived from factor analysis. The theory has been widely used in several fields as a paradigm for research, particularly in cross-cultural psychology, international management, and cross-cultural communication. Hofstede developed his original model as a result of using factor analysis to examine the results of a world-wide survey of employee values by IBM in the 1960s and 1970s. The theory was one of the first that could be quantified, and could be used to explain observed differences between cultures.
The original theory proposed four dimensions along which cultural values could be analyzed: individualism-collectivism; uncertainty avoidance; power distance (strength of social hierarchy) and masculinity-femininity (task orientation versus person-orientation). Independent research in Hong Kong led Hofstede to add a fifth dimension, long-term orientation, to cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm. In the 2010 edition of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind Hofstede added a sixth dimension, indulgence versus self-restraint, as a result of co-author Michael Minkov's analysis of data from the World Values Survey. Further research has refined some of the original dimensions, and introduced the difference between country-level and individual-level data in analysis.
Definitions of attitude
An attitude can be defined as a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, event, activities, ideas, or just about anything in your environment, but there is debate about precise definitions. Eagly and Chaiken, for example, define an attitude "a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor." Though it is sometimes common to define an attitude as affect toward an object, affect (i.e., discrete emotions or overall arousal) is generally understood to be distinct from attitude as a measure of favorability.
Attitude formation
According to Doob (1947), learning can account for most of the attitudes we hold. Theories of classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning and social learning are mainly responsible for formation of attitude. Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience. Tesser (1993) has argued that hereditary variables may affect attitudes - but believes that they may do so indirectly. For example, consistency theories, which imply that we must be consistent in our beliefs and values. As with any type of heritability, to determine if a particular trait has a basis in our genes, twin studies are used. The most famous example of such a theory is Dissonance-reduction theory, associated with Leon Festinger, which explains that when the components of an attitude (including belief and behavior) are at odds an individual may adjust one to match the other (for example, adjusting a belief to match a behavior). Other theories include balance theory, originally proposed by Heider (1958), and the self-perception theory, originally proposed by Daryl Bem.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Attitude Change
Starting from the behavioural intentions,
these include the functions of an individual’s attitude towards the
behaviour and the subjective norm surrounding the performance of the
behaviour. Accordingly, the actual use of an innovation is determined by
the individual’s behavioural intention to use it. The Attitude towards an act or a behaviour
are the individual’s positive or negative feelings about performing a
behaviour, determined through an assessment of one’s beliefs. Subjective
norm is defined as an individual’s perception of whether people
important to the individual think the behaviours should be performed. “To put the definition into simple terms: a person’s
volitional (voluntary) behaviour is predicted by his/her attitude
toward that behaviour and how he/she thinks other people would view them
if they performed the behaviour. A person’s attitude, combined with subjective norms, forms his/her behavioral intention”.
In psychology, the theory of planned behavior is a theory about the link between attitudes and behavior. The concept was proposed by Icek Ajzen to improve on the predictive power of the theory of reasoned action by including perceived behavioural control.[1] It is one of the most predictive persuasion theories. It has been applied to studies of the relations among beliefs, attitudes, behavioral intentions and behaviors in various fields such as advertising, public relations, advertising campaigns and healthcare.
The theory states that attitude toward behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, together shape an individual's behavioral intentions and behaviors.
perception,
Perception (from the Latin perceptio, percipio) is the organization, identification and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs. For example, vision involves light striking the retinas of the eyes, smell is mediated by odor molecules and hearing involves pressure waves. Perception is not the passive receipt of these signals, but can be shaped by learning, memory and expectation. Perception involves these "top-down" effects as well as the "bottom-up" process of processing sensory input. The "bottom-up" processing is basically low-level information that's used to build up higher-level information (i.e. - shapes for object recognition). The "top-down" processing refers to a person's concept and expectations (knowledge) that influence perception. Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness.
Perception is a three phase process of selecting, organizing and interpreting information.
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, which may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison with what is normatively expected; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable facts. A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics.
Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive, for example, because they lead to more effective actions in a given context or enable faster decisions when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy (heuristics). Others presumably result from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing.
The following is a list of the more commonly studied cognitive biases:
motivation,
learning and reinforcement,
work stress and stress management;
The dynamics of organization behaviour – power and politics, conflict and negotiation, leadership process and styles, communication;
The Organizational Processes - decision making, job design;
Classical, Neoclassical and Contingency approaches to organizational design;
Organizational theory and design - organizational culture, managing cultural diversity, learning organization ;
Organizational change and development ;
Knowledge Based Enterprise – systems and processes;
Networked and virtual organizations.
Topics:
Environmental, Social and Psychological Factors; Leadership Style; Flexible Managers; Neo Classical and Open Systems of Organization; Formal and informal groups; Intergroup conflict resolution; Fred, Friedler, McClleland; Lewins, Grieners Sequential, Leavitts Systems models; Action Research; Behavioral Theory of Firm; Simon's Satisfying theory; Cohen and Cyert Models of Behaviorism; Maslow, Herzberg, McGregor models; Intinsic and extrinsic rewards; Power types; Power and Leadership; Ideal Leader; Informal and formal communication channel; Grapevine; Communication barriers; Leadership styles; Enclave leadership; Resistance to change; Change Agent; Motivation; Personality; Systems Theory; Hierarchy and Chain of command; Conflict; Likerts, Blake and Mouton Model; Superior-Subordinate communication; Conflict resolution; Empowerment; Satisfaction Productivity Controversy; Classical and Contemporary span of control; Change strategy; Creative and dominant leaders; Delegation and decentralisation; Group dynamics; Choice of Organisation structure; Hall's Stages of Personality Development; Morale and Productivity; Administrator attributes; Systems Analysis; Conlict Management; Management of Change; Knowledge based Enterprises; Stress; Organisational Climate; Intellectual Capital; Creativity and Innovation; Downsizing; Traditional Leadership theory; Charismatic and Transformational Leadership; Organizational Philosophy and ethics; Managerial Grid; Communication Process; Overcoming communication barriers; Programmed and Nonprogrammed Decisions; Sensitivity Training; High Performance Leadership; Stages of Group Development; Employee Morale
Organizational studies encompass the study of organizations from multiple viewpoints, methods, and levels of analysis. For instance, one textbook divides these multiple viewpoints into three perspectives: modern, symbolic, and postmodern. Another traditional distinction, present especially in American academia, is between the study of "micro" organizational behaviour — which refers to individual and group dynamics in an organizational setting — and "macro" strategic management and organizational theory which studies whole organizations and industries, how they adapt, and the strategies, structures and contingencies that guide them. To this distinction, some scholars have added an interest in "meso" scale structures - power, culture, and the networks of individuals and i.e. ronit units in organizations — and "field" level analysis which study how whole populations of organizations interact.
Whenever people interact in organizations, many factors come into play. Modern organizational studies attempt to understand and model these factors. Like all modernist social sciences, organizational studies seek to control, predict, and explain. There is some controversy over the ethics of controlling workers' behavior, as well as the manner in which workers are treated (see Taylor's scientific management approach compared to the human relations movement of the 1940s). As such, organizational behaviour or OB (and its cousin, Industrial psychology) have at times been accused of being the scientific tool of the powerful. Those accusations notwithstanding, OB can play a major role in organizational development, enhancing organizational performance, as well as individual and group performance/satisfaction/commitment.
One of the main goals of organizational theorists is, according to Simms (1994) "to revitalize organizational theory and develop a better conceptualization of organizational life." An organizational theorist should carefully consider levels assumptions being made in theory, and is concerned to help managers and administrators.
Organizational behaviour is a growing field. Organizational studies departments generally form part of business schools, although many universities also have industrial psychology and industrial economics programs.
The field is highly influential in the business world with practitioners such as Peter Drucker and Peter Senge, who turned the academic research into business practices. Organizational behaviour is becoming more important in the global economy as people with diverse backgrounds and cultural values must work together effectively and efficiently. It is also under increasing criticism as a field for its ethnocentric and pro-capitalist assumptions.
During the last 20 years, organizational behavior study and practice has developed and expanded through creating integrations with other domains:
Anthropology became an interesting prism to understanding firms as communities, by introducing concepts like Organizational culture, 'organizational rituals' and 'symbolic acts' enabling new ways to understand organizations as communities.
Leadership Understanding: the crucial role of leadership at various levels of an organization in the process of change management.
Ethics and their importance as pillars of any vision and one of the most important driving forces in an organization.
Aesthetics: Within the last decades a field emerged that focuses on the aesthetic sphere of our existence in organizations,[5] drawing on interdisciplinary theories and methods from the humanities and disciplines such as theatre studies, literature, music, visual studies and many more.[6]
The individual processes –
personality,
"Personality" can be defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, emotions,interpersonal orientations motivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word "personality" originates from the Latin persona, which means mask.
Personality theories
The study of personality is based on the essential insight that all people are similar in some ways, yet different in others. For example, all people learn, yet people learn different things, in different ways, and to different extents. There have been many different definitions of personality proposed. Most contemporary psychologists though would agree on the following definition:
Personality is that pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguishes one person from another and that persists over time and situations.
Trait theories
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, personality traits are "enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself that are exhibited in a wide range of social and personal contexts." Theorists generally assume a) traits are relatively stable over time, b) traits differ among individuals (for instance, some people are outgoing while others are reserved), and c) traits influence behavior. When people are describing a person, they constantly talk about traits to help define the person as a whole. Traits are relatively constant; they do not usually change. Traits are also bipolar; they vary along a continuum between one extreme and the other (e.g. friendly vs. unfriendly).
The most common models of traits incorporate three to five broad dimensions or factors. All trait theories incorporate at least two dimensions, extraversion and neuroticism, which historically featured in Hippocrates' humoral theory.
Gordon Allport delineated different kinds of traits, which he also called dispositions. Central traits are basic to an individual's personality, while secondary traits are more peripheral. Common traits are those recognized within a culture and thus may vary from culture to culture. Cardinal traits are those by which an individual may be strongly recognized. In his book, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, Gordon Allport (1937) both established personality psychology as a legitimate intellectual discipline and introduced the first of the modern trait theories.
Raymond Cattell's research propagated a two-tiered personality structure with sixteen "primary factors" (16 Personality Factors) and five "secondary factors." In Cattell's lengthy career, he had written 50 books, 500 journals, and 30 different types of standardized tests. For Cattell, personality itself was defined in terms of behavioral prediction. He defined personality as ‘‘that which permits a prediction of what a person will do in a given situation.’’
John Gittinger's theory and its applications (the Personality Assessment System (PAS)) uses the Wechsler intelligence tests, which are well standardized and objective instruments rather than self-report tests. PAS factors out personality traits (primitivity) and two additional levels, Basid and Surface, which are adaptations by environmentally induced presses and learning. Gittinger's multivariate personality descriptions exceed 500 data-based outcome descriptions.
Hans Eysenck believed just three traits—extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism—were sufficient to describe human personality. Differences between Cattell and Eysenck emerged due to preferences for different forms of factor analysis, with Cattell using oblique, Eysenck orthogonal rotation to analyze the factors that emerged when personality questionnaires were subjected to statistical analysis. Today, the Big Five factors have the weight of a considerable amount of empirical research behind them, building on the work of Cattell and others. Eysenck, along with another contemporary in trait psychology named J. P. Guilford (1959), believed that the resultant trait factors obtained from factor analysis should be statistically independent of one another —that is, the factors should be arranged (rotated) so that they are uncorrelated or orthogonal (at right angles) to one another.
Lewis Goldberg proposed a five-dimension personality model, nicknamed the "Big Five":
Openness to Experience: the tendency to be imaginative, independent, and interested in variety vs. practical, conforming, and interested in routine.
Conscientiousness: the tendency to be organized, careful, and disciplined vs. disorganized, careless, and impulsive.
Extraversion: the tendency to be sociable, fun-loving, and affectionate vs. retiring, somber, and reserved.
Agreeableness: the tendency to be softhearted, trusting, and helpful vs. ruthless, suspicious, and uncooperative.
Neuroticism: the tendency to be calm, secure, and self-satisfied vs. anxious, insecure, and self-pitying
The Big Five contain important dimensions of personality. However, some personality researchers
argue that this list of major traits is not exhaustive. Some support has been found for two additional factors: excellent/ordinary and evil/decent. However, no definitive conclusions have been established.
Type theories
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of people. Personality types are distinguished from personality traits, which come in different levels or degrees. For example, according to type theories, there are two types of people, introverts and extroverts. According to trait theories, introversion and extroversion are part of a continuous dimension, with many people in the middle. The idea of psychological types originated in the theoretical work of Carl Jung and William Marston, whose work is reviewed in Dr. Travis Bradberry's Self-Awareness. Jung's seminal 1921 book on the subject is available in English as Psychological Types.
Building on the writings and observations of Jung, during World War II, Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine C. Briggs, delineated personality types by constructing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Briggs and Myers also added another personality dimension to their type indicator to measure whether a person prefers to use a judging or perceiving function when interacting with the external world. Therefore they included questions designed to indicate whether someone wishes to come to conclusions (judgment) or to keep options open (perception).
This personality typology has some aspects of a trait theory: it explains people's behaviour in terms of opposite fixed characteristics. In these more traditional models, the sensing/intuition preference is considered the most basic, dividing people into "N" (intuitive) or "S" (sensing) personality types. An "N" is further assumed to be guided either by thinking or feeling, and divided into the "NT" (scientist, engineer) or "NF" (author, humanitarian) temperament. An "S", by contrast, is assumed to be guided more by the judgment/perception axis, and thus divided into the "SJ" (guardian, traditionalist) or "SP" (performer, artisan) temperament. These four are considered basic, with the other two factors in each case (including always extraversion/introversion) less important. Critics of this traditional view have observed that the types can be quite strongly stereotyped by professions (although neither Myers nor Keirsey engaged in such stereotyping in their type descriptions, and thus may arise more from the need to categorize people for purposes of guiding their career choice. This among other objections led to the emergence of the five-factor view, which is less concerned with behavior under work conditions and more concerned with behavior in personal and emotional circumstances. (It should be noted, however, that the MBTI is not designed to measure the "work self", but rather what Myers and McCaulley called the "shoes-off self." Some critics have argued for more or fewer dimensions while others have proposed entirely different theories (often assuming different definitions of "personality").
Type A and Type B personality theory: During the 1950s, Meyer Friedman and his co-workers defined what they called Type A and Type B behavior patterns. They theorized that intense, hard-driving Type A personalities had a higher risk of coronary disease because they are "stress junkies." Type B people, on the other hand, tended to be relaxed, less competitive, and lower in risk. There was also a Type AB mixed profile.
John L. Holland's RIASEC vocational model, commonly referred to as the Holland Codes, stipulates that six personality types lead people to choose their career paths. In this circumplex model, the six types are represented as a hexagon, with adjacent types more closely related than those more distant. The model is widely used in vocational counseling.
The first section of the profile reports results on six General Occupational Themes:
- Conventional (The “Organizers”):
- Indicates an interest in problem solving through
organizing. Individuals that show high scores in this occupational theme
enjoy activities that permit organization of information in a clear,
orderly fashion. They are detail-oriented logical, conforming, and like
structure and responsible.
- Accountant,
- Credit Manager,
- Actuary,
- Medical Records and Health Information Technician,
- Air Traffic Controllers,
- Financial Analyst,
- Business Education Teacher
- Realistic (The “Do-ers”):
- Indicates an interest in solving problems by hands-on
activity. Individuals that show high scores in this occupational theme
enjoy working with machines, tools, objects, and animals. They are
practical, reserved, and get pleasure from work that involves physical
activity. They often enjoy working outdoors on concrete problems and
seeing tangible results.
- Law Enforcement Officer,
- Engineer,
- Forester,
- Landscape/Grounds Manager,
- Horticulturist,
- Athletic Trainer
- Investigative (The “Thinkers”):
- Indicates an interest in abstract problem solving.
Individuals that show high scores in this occupational theme tend to be
methodical, original, and logical. They enjoy researching and exploring
ideas, collecting and analyzing data, and solving problems of a
conceptual nature.
- Psychologist,
- Chiropractor,
- Dentist,
- Chemist,
- Software Developer,
- Veterinarian
- Artistic (The “Creators”):
- Indicates an interest in solving problems through
creativity and innovation. Individuals that show high scores in this
occupational theme enjoy being original, independent, self-expressive,
innovative, and unstructured. They are often skilled in music, art,
drama, language, and writing.
- Librarian,
- Broadcast Journalist,
- Corporate Trainer,
- Urban & Regional Planner,
- Artist,
- Public Relations Director
- Enterprising (The “Persuaders”):
- Indicates an interest in solving problems by persuading.
Individuals that show high scores in this occupational theme seek to use
words and feelings in dealing with people to motivate, persuade,
manage, and sell things or promote ideas. They tend to be assertive,
outgoing, ambitious, enthusiastic, influential, and goal oriented.
- Chef,
- Travel Consultant,
- Restaurant Manager,
- Optician,
- Human Resources Manager,
- Purchasing Agent
Eduard Spranger's personality-model, consisting of six (or, by some revisions, 6 +1) basic types of value attitudes, described in his book Types of Men (Lebensformen; Halle (Saale): Niemeyer, 1914; English translation by P. J. W. Pigors - New York: G. E. Stechert Company, 1928).
Behaviorist theories
Behaviorists explain personality in terms of the effects external stimuli have on behavior. It was a radical shift away from Freudian philosophy. This school of thought was developed by B. F. Skinner who put forth a model which emphasized the mutual interaction of the person or "the organism" with its environment. Skinner believed children do bad things because the behavior obtains attention that serves as a reinforcer. For example: a child cries because the child's crying in the past has led to attention. These are the response, and consequences. The response is the child crying, and the attention that child gets is the reinforcing consequence. According to this theory, people's behavior is formed by processes such as operant conditioning. Skinner put forward a "three term contingency model" which helped promote analysis of behavior based on the "Stimulus - Response - Consequence Model" in which the critical question is: "Under which circumstances or antecedent 'stimuli' does the organism engage in a particular behavior or 'response', which in turn produces a particular 'consequence'?"
Richard Herrnstein extended this theory by accounting for attitudes and traits. An attitude develops as the response strength (the tendency to respond) in the presences of a group of stimuli become stable. Rather than describing conditionable traits in non-behavioral language, response strength in a given situation accounts for the environmental portion. Herrstein also saw traits as having a large genetic or biological component as do most modern behaviorists.
Ivan Pavlov is another notable influence. He is well known for his classical conditioning experiments involving dogs. These physiological studies led him to discover the foundation of behaviorism as well as classical conditioning.
Social cognitive theories
In cognitive theory, behavior is explained as guided by cognitions (e.g. expectations) about the world, especially those about other people. Cognitive theories are theories of personality that emphasize cognitive processes such as thinking and judging.
Albert Bandura, a social learning theorist suggested the forces of memory and emotions worked in conjunction with environmental influences. Bandura was known mostly for his "Bobo Doll experiment". During these experiments, Bandura video taped a college student kicking and verbally abusing a bobo doll. He then showed this video to a class of kindergarten children who were getting ready to go out to play. When they entered the play room, they saw bobo dolls, and some hammers. The people observing these children at play saw a group of children beating the doll. He called this study and his findings observational learning, or modeling.
Early examples of approaches to cognitive style are listed by Baron (1982).[24] These include Witkin's (1965) work on field dependency, Gardner's (1953) discovering people had consistent preference for the number of categories they used to categorise heterogeneous objects, and Block and Petersen's (1955) work on confidence in line discrimination judgments. Baron relates early development of cognitive approaches of personality to ego psychology. More central to this field have been:
Attributional style theory dealing with different ways in which people explain events in their lives. This approach builds upon locus of control, but extends it by stating we also need to consider whether people attribute to stable causes or variable causes, and to global causes or specific causes.
Various scales have been developed to assess both attributional style and locus of control. Locus of control scales include those used by Rotter and later by Duttweiler, the Nowicki and Strickland (1973) Locus of Control Scale for Children and various locus of control scales specifically in the health domain, most famously that of Kenneth Wallston and his colleagues, The Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale. Attributional style has been assessed by the Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Expanded Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Attributions Questionnaire, the Real Events Attributional Style Questionnaire and the Attributional Style Assessment Test.
Achievement style theory focuses upon identification of an individual's Locus of Control tendency, such as by Rotter's evaluations, and was found by Cassandra Bolyard Whyte to provide valuable information for improving academic performance of students. Individuals with internal control tendencies are likely to persist to better academic performance levels, presenting an achievement personality, according to Cassandra B. Whyte.
Recognition that the tendency to believe that hard work and persistence often results in attainment of life and academic goals has influenced formal educational and counseling efforts with students of various ages and in various settings since the 1970s research about achievement. Counseling aimed toward encouraging individuals to design ambitious goals and work toward them, with recognition that there are external factors that may impact, often results in the incorporation of a more positive achievement style by students and employees, whatever the setting, to include higher education, workplace, or justice programming.
Walter Mischel (1999) has also defended a cognitive approach to personality. His work refers to "Cognitive Affective Units", and considers factors such as encoding of stimuli, affect, goal-setting, and self-regulatory beliefs. The term "Cognitive Affective Units" shows how his approach considers affect as well as cognition.
The authors identified five cognitive-affective units:
- encoding strategies, or people's individualized manner of categorizing information from external stimuli;
- competencies and self-regulatory strategies: intelligence, self-regulatory strategies, self-formulated goals, and self-produced consequences;
- expectancies and beliefs, or people's predictions about the consequences of each of the different behavioral possibilities;
- goals and values, which provide behavior consistency;
- affective responses, including emotions, feelings, and the affects accompanying physiological reactions.
Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) is another cognitive personality theory. Developed by Seymour Epstein, CEST argues that humans operate by way of two independent information processing systems: experiential system and rational system. The experiential system is fast and emotion-driven. The rational system is slow and logic-driven. These two systems interact to determine our goals, thoughts, and behavior.
Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s. From the theory, Kelly derived a psychotherapy approach and also a technique called The Repertory Grid Interview that helped his patients to uncover their own "constructs" (defined later) with minimal intervention or interpretation by the therapist. The Repertory Grid was later adapted for various uses within organizations, including decision-making and interpretation of other people's world-views. From his 1963 book, A Theory of Personality, pp. 103–104:
- Fundamental Postulate: A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which the person anticipates events.
- Construction Corollary: A person anticipates events by construing their replications.
- Individuality Corollary: People differ from one another in their construction of events.
- Organization Corollary: Each person characteristically evolves, for convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs.
- Dichotomy Corollary: A person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs.
- Choice Corollary: People choose for themselves the particular alternative in a dichotomized construct through which they anticipate the greater possibility for extension and definition of their system.
- Range Corollary: A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only.
- Experience Corollary: A person's construction system varies as the person successively construes the replication of events.
- Modulation Corollary: The variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose ranges of conveniences the variants lie.
- Fragmentation Corollary: A person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other.
- Commonality Corollary: To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, the psychological processes of the two individuals are similar to each other.
- Sociality Corollary: To the extent that one person construes another's construction processes, that person may play a role in a social process involving the other person.
values and attitude,
A personal value is extremely absolute or relative ethical value, the assumption of which can be the basis for ethical action. A value system is a set of consistent values and measures. A principle value is a foundation upon which other values and measures of integrity are based. Those values which are not physiologically determined and normally considered objective, such as a desire to avoid physical pain, seek pleasure, etc., are considered subjective, vary across individuals and cultures and are in many ways aligned with belief and belief systems. Types of values include ethical/moral value, doctrinal/ideological (religious, political) values, social values, and aesthetic values. It is debated whether some values which are not clearly physiologically determined are intrinsic such as altruism and whether some such as acquisitiveness should be valued as vices or virtues. Values have typically been studied in sociology, anthropology, social psychology, moral philosophy, and business ethics.
Values can be defined as broad preferences concerning appropriate courses of action or outcomes. As such, values reflect a person’s sense of right and wrong or what “ought” to be. “Equal rights for all”, "Excellence deserves admiration", and “People should be treated with respect and dignity” are representative of values. Values tend to influence attitudes and behavior. For example, if you value equal rights for all and you go to work for an organization that treats its managers much better than it does its workers, you may form the attitude that the company is an unfair place to work; consequently, you may not produce well or may perhaps leave the company. It is likely that if the company had a more egalitarian policy, your attitude and behaviors would have been more positive.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory
Geert Hofstede's theory of cultural dimensions describes the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members, and how these values relate to behavior, using a structure derived from factor analysis. The theory has been widely used in several fields as a paradigm for research, particularly in cross-cultural psychology, international management, and cross-cultural communication. Hofstede developed his original model as a result of using factor analysis to examine the results of a world-wide survey of employee values by IBM in the 1960s and 1970s. The theory was one of the first that could be quantified, and could be used to explain observed differences between cultures.
The original theory proposed four dimensions along which cultural values could be analyzed: individualism-collectivism; uncertainty avoidance; power distance (strength of social hierarchy) and masculinity-femininity (task orientation versus person-orientation). Independent research in Hong Kong led Hofstede to add a fifth dimension, long-term orientation, to cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm. In the 2010 edition of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind Hofstede added a sixth dimension, indulgence versus self-restraint, as a result of co-author Michael Minkov's analysis of data from the World Values Survey. Further research has refined some of the original dimensions, and introduced the difference between country-level and individual-level data in analysis.
- Power distance index (PDI): “Power distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.” Cultures that endorse low power distance expect and accept power relations that are more consultative or democratic. People relate to one another more as equals regardless of formal positions. Subordinates are more comfortable with and demand the right to contribute to and critique the decision making of those in power. In high power distance countries, less powerful accept power relations that are more autocratic and paternalistic. Subordinates acknowledge the power of others simply based on where they are situated in certain formal, hierarchical positions. As such, the power distance index Hofstede defines does not reflect an objective difference in power distribution, but rather the way people perceive power differences.
- Individualism (IDV) vs. collectivism: “The degree to which individuals are integrated into groups”. In individualistic societies, the stress is put on personal achievements and individual rights. People are expected to stand up for themselves and their immediate family, and to choose their own affiliations. In contrast, in collectivist societies, individuals act predominantly as members of a lifelong and cohesive group or organization (note: “The word collectivism in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state”). People have large extended families, which are used as a protection in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.
- Uncertainty avoidance index (UAI): “a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity”. It reflects the extent to which members of a society attempt to cope with anxiety by minimizing uncertainty. People in cultures with high uncertainty avoidance tend to be more emotional. They try to minimize the occurrence of unknown and unusual circumstances and to proceed with careful changes step by step by planning and by implementing rules, laws and regulations. In contrast, low uncertainty avoidance cultures accept and feel comfortable in unstructured situations or changeable environments and try to have as few rules as possible. People in these cultures tend to be more pragmatic, they are more tolerant of change.
- Masculinity (MAS), vs. femininity: “The distribution of emotional roles between the genders”. Masculine cultures’ values are competitiveness, assertiveness, materialism, ambition and power, whereas feminine cultures place more value on relationships and quality of life. In masculine cultures, the differences between gender roles are more dramatic and less fluid than in feminine cultures where men and women have the same values emphasizing modesty and caring. As a result of the taboo on sexuality in many cultures, particularly masculine ones, and because of the obvious gender generalizations implied by Hofstede's terminology, this dimension is often renamed by users of Hofstede's work, e.g. to Quantity of Life vs. Quality of Life.
- Long term orientation (LTO), vs. short term orientation: First called “Confucian dynamism”, it describes societies’ time horizon. Long term oriented societies attach more importance to the future. They foster pragmatic values oriented towards rewards, including persistence, saving and capacity for adaptation. In short term oriented societies, values promoted are related to the past and the present, including steadiness, respect for tradition, preservation of one’s face, reciprocation and fulfilling social obligations.
Definitions of attitude
An attitude can be defined as a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, event, activities, ideas, or just about anything in your environment, but there is debate about precise definitions. Eagly and Chaiken, for example, define an attitude "a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor." Though it is sometimes common to define an attitude as affect toward an object, affect (i.e., discrete emotions or overall arousal) is generally understood to be distinct from attitude as a measure of favorability.
Attitude formation
According to Doob (1947), learning can account for most of the attitudes we hold. Theories of classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning and social learning are mainly responsible for formation of attitude. Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience. Tesser (1993) has argued that hereditary variables may affect attitudes - but believes that they may do so indirectly. For example, consistency theories, which imply that we must be consistent in our beliefs and values. As with any type of heritability, to determine if a particular trait has a basis in our genes, twin studies are used. The most famous example of such a theory is Dissonance-reduction theory, associated with Leon Festinger, which explains that when the components of an attitude (including belief and behavior) are at odds an individual may adjust one to match the other (for example, adjusting a belief to match a behavior). Other theories include balance theory, originally proposed by Heider (1958), and the self-perception theory, originally proposed by Daryl Bem.
Self-perception theory
Self-perception theory (SPT) is an account of attitude change developed by psychologist Daryl Bem. It asserts that people develop their attitudes by observing their behavior and concluding what attitudes must have caused them. The theory is counterintuitive in nature, as the conventional wisdom is that attitudes come prior to behaviors. Furthermore, the theory suggests that a person induces attitudes without accessing internal cognition and mood states. The person reasons their own overt behaviors rationally in the same way they attempt to explain others’ behaviors.
Attitude change
Attitudes are the evaluations and associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object.They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as an individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when cognitive dissonance occurs--when two attitudes or when attitude and behavior conflict. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components. It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotion node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Attitude Change
Cognitive dissonance, a theory originally developed by Festinger (1957)], is the idea that people experience a sense of guilt or uneasiness when two linked cognitions are inconsistent, such as when there are two conflicting attitudes about a topic, or inconsistencies between one's attitude and behavior on a certain topic. The basic idea of the Cognitive Dissonance Theory relating to attitude change, is that people are motivated to reduce dissonance which can be achieved through changing their attitudes, beliefs,or behaviors (action).
Dual process theory
In psychology, a dual process theory provides an account of how a phenomenon can occur in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious process and an explicit (controlled), conscious process. Verbalized explicit processes or attitudes and actions may change with persuasion or education; though implicit process or attitudes usually take a long amount of time to change with the forming of new habits.
Attitude-behavior relationship
Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA)
The
theory of reasoned action (TRA), developed by Martin Fishbein and Icek
Ajzen, posits that individual behaviour is driven by behavioural
intentions.
The theory received particular attention in the field of consumer
behaviour as it provides a simple tool to identify possibilities to
change customers’ behaviour when using an innovation.
To this regard, the actual use of an innovation is determined by the
individual’s behavioural intention to use it. The model resulting from
their research is visualised in and consist of the following
components:
Theory of planned behavior
In psychology, the theory of planned behavior is a theory about the link between attitudes and behavior. The concept was proposed by Icek Ajzen to improve on the predictive power of the theory of reasoned action by including perceived behavioural control.[1] It is one of the most predictive persuasion theories. It has been applied to studies of the relations among beliefs, attitudes, behavioral intentions and behaviors in various fields such as advertising, public relations, advertising campaigns and healthcare.
The theory states that attitude toward behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, together shape an individual's behavioral intentions and behaviors.
perception,
Perception (from the Latin perceptio, percipio) is the organization, identification and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs. For example, vision involves light striking the retinas of the eyes, smell is mediated by odor molecules and hearing involves pressure waves. Perception is not the passive receipt of these signals, but can be shaped by learning, memory and expectation. Perception involves these "top-down" effects as well as the "bottom-up" process of processing sensory input. The "bottom-up" processing is basically low-level information that's used to build up higher-level information (i.e. - shapes for object recognition). The "top-down" processing refers to a person's concept and expectations (knowledge) that influence perception. Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness.
Perception is a three phase process of selecting, organizing and interpreting information.
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, which may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison with what is normatively expected; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable facts. A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics.
Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive, for example, because they lead to more effective actions in a given context or enable faster decisions when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy (heuristics). Others presumably result from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing.
The following is a list of the more commonly studied cognitive biases:
- Framing by using a too-narrow approach and description of the situation or issue.
- Hindsight bias, sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable.
- Fundamental attribution error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.
- Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions; this is related to the concept of cognitive dissonance.
- Self-serving bias is the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.
- Belief bias is when one's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by their belief in the truth or falsity of the conclusion.
motivation,
learning and reinforcement,
work stress and stress management;
The dynamics of organization behaviour – power and politics, conflict and negotiation, leadership process and styles, communication;
The Organizational Processes - decision making, job design;
Classical, Neoclassical and Contingency approaches to organizational design;
Organizational theory and design - organizational culture, managing cultural diversity, learning organization ;
Organizational change and development ;
Knowledge Based Enterprise – systems and processes;
Networked and virtual organizations.
Topics:
Environmental, Social and Psychological Factors; Leadership Style; Flexible Managers; Neo Classical and Open Systems of Organization; Formal and informal groups; Intergroup conflict resolution; Fred, Friedler, McClleland; Lewins, Grieners Sequential, Leavitts Systems models; Action Research; Behavioral Theory of Firm; Simon's Satisfying theory; Cohen and Cyert Models of Behaviorism; Maslow, Herzberg, McGregor models; Intinsic and extrinsic rewards; Power types; Power and Leadership; Ideal Leader; Informal and formal communication channel; Grapevine; Communication barriers; Leadership styles; Enclave leadership; Resistance to change; Change Agent; Motivation; Personality; Systems Theory; Hierarchy and Chain of command; Conflict; Likerts, Blake and Mouton Model; Superior-Subordinate communication; Conflict resolution; Empowerment; Satisfaction Productivity Controversy; Classical and Contemporary span of control; Change strategy; Creative and dominant leaders; Delegation and decentralisation; Group dynamics; Choice of Organisation structure; Hall's Stages of Personality Development; Morale and Productivity; Administrator attributes; Systems Analysis; Conlict Management; Management of Change; Knowledge based Enterprises; Stress; Organisational Climate; Intellectual Capital; Creativity and Innovation; Downsizing; Traditional Leadership theory; Charismatic and Transformational Leadership; Organizational Philosophy and ethics; Managerial Grid; Communication Process; Overcoming communication barriers; Programmed and Nonprogrammed Decisions; Sensitivity Training; High Performance Leadership; Stages of Group Development; Employee Morale
sir at the end your ob notes there is a seperate paragrah which specifies as topic, is it means these are the topics which needed to be covered from books?
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