discussion 2 new
Chapter 5
Welcome again to Organizational Behavior. This module will prepare you to meet the
course learning objectives of identifying themes that influence a person’s perception
and the decision-making process. Our first topic covers personality and
values and their influence in the workplace. In order for managers to better predict and
understand behavior, they must know the personalities of those who work for them.
We will review some of the research over personalities and examine how our values shape
many of our work-related behaviors. Let’s first look at Personality.
We will begin by defining personality. It’s a dynamic concept describing the growth
and development of a person’s whole psychological system.
We can think of it as the sum total of ways in which an individual interprets,
understands and reacts to and interacts with others.
One of the greatest challenges in the study of personality is its measurement.
Managers need to know how to measure personality because accurately measuring personality
gives managers an advantage in the workplace. The most common means of measuring personality is
through self-report surveys in which individuals evaluate themselves on a series of factors,
such as “I worry a lot about the future”. Some of you may be familiar with the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) which is a widely used personality framework.
I am sure many of you have taken a version of this instrument at some point either for your employer
or somewhere during your education. In OB, a common framework to understand
personality comes from The Big Five Personality Model.
Modern efforts to define personality started in the early part of the 20th century when
psychologists took from the dictionary 18,000 personality terms. Finally, in the 1950’s,
two Air Force contactors discovered the majority of personality items statistically reduced to just
five factors which quickly became known as the Big Five Personality Factors.
Keep in mind that this model depicts personality at its broadest level of abstraction,
as nearly all of a person’s characteristics are described using just these 5 traits. The five
trait dimensions are: Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability (Narcissism),
Extraversion, Openness & Agreeableness There has been a lot of research on the Big
Five Traits influence on performance at work. Here are some basic conclusions from the research:
Conscientiousness is the best predictor of job performance. People who rank high in
conscientiousness are organized, willing to work hard, and achievement oriented.
Emotional stability is most strongly related to life satisfaction,
job satisfaction, and low stress levels. This is an
important trait considering the rapidly changing demands of the current workplace.
Extraverts tend to perform better in jobs that require significant interpersonal interaction,
like sales and customer service. Those who score high in openness
cope better with organizational change. And, agreeable individuals are better liked
and tend to do well in teams and in customer service positions.
Our Values also greatly impact our behaviors in the workplace.
Values represent basic convictions that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence
is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of
conduct or end-state of existence. They contain a judgmental element in
that they carry an individual’s ideas as to what is right, good, or desirable.
All of us have a hierarchy of values that forms our value system. This is the relative importance
we assign to values such as freedom, pleasure, self-respect, honesty, obedience, and equality.
Values tend to be relatively stable and enduring. They lay the foundation for
understanding people’s attitudes, motivation, and behavior (which we discuss in the next module).
In OB, we also assess personality through Person-Job Fit and Person-Organization Fit.
When companies recruit candidates, they are concerned with matching both the personality
and the values of an employee with those of the job and the organization.
Research confirms that job satisfaction and the propensity to leave a job
(turnover) depend on the degree to which individuals successfully match their
personalities to an occupational environment. A common assessment to assess person-job fit
and to a lesser extent, person-organization fit is the Holland Typology of Personality
and Congruent Occupations. Another way to assess personality
in the workplace is to use Hofstede’s 5 Value Dimensions of National Culture.
In the module, you will find view a video to help you gain a better understanding of
Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions. Values are learned and passed down through generations
and vary by cultures. Hofstede studied the impact of culture on work-related values. In doing so, he
examined the nations of the world and classified them based on the values their population shared.
The five value dimensions are: Power Distance, Individualism versus Collectivism, Masculinity
versus Femininity, Uncertainty Avoidance, Long-term versus Short-term Orientation
The GLOBE Framework built upon Hofstede’s research and has added additional
four additional National Culture dimensions. In our next topic, we explore Perception and
Individual Decision Making. We examine how perception
acts to create an employee’s view of reality and modifies decision making.
Perception is the process through which people organize and interpret their sensory information.
Perception is related to personality and it can be substantially different from objective reality.
Perception is affected by our personalities, our past experiences, and the context of the
situation in which the perception is made. We also use Common Shortcuts in Judging Others.
We use a number of shortcuts when we judge situations and others within those situations.
This is a natural behavior born out of the human condition of evolutionary psychology.
While shortcuts may be valid and helpful at times, they can also
lead to significant distortions and biases. Common examples of these distortions such as
the Fundamental Attribution Error, Halo/Hornes Effect, Contrast Effect, Stereotyping,
Overconfidence Bias, and/or Anchoring Bias are discussed in the chapter.
Additionally, there is a video in the module on examples of unconscious bias at work.
Finally, let’ look at the Link Between Perception and Individual Decision Making
While we are trained to make rational decisions following a step-by step process,
we rarely make decisions this way. More often, we make decisions using
Bounded Rationality and Intuition. Bounded Rationality is a decision-making
process that constructs a simplified model of a problem complexity to help us make
a decision. For example, when you decided to go to back to College and finish your degree,
you literally had over a thousand options just inside the U.S.
You had to quickly eliminate options and lower the consideration set of choices
to a manageable set of sufficing options based on the parameters most important to
you such as cost, convenience and location. Intuition is a process of using our distilled
past experience to guide us in making a decision based on past favorable outcomes
and decisions. We use our “gut”, it is less rational approach and often includes emotion.
Finally, based on what we learned from shortcuts in judging others and individual perception, it’s
easy to see how decision-making errors can occur. We can only overcome our biases and shortcuts in
judging others once we recognize our own biases. Managers must strive to make better decisions by
recognizing perceptual biases and decision-making errors. By combining rational analysis with
intuition, manager’s and leaders can often improve their overall decision-making effectiveness.
Course Objective
CO-3. Identify themes that influence a person's perception and decision-making process.
Chapter 5 Learning Objectives
· 3.1 Describe personality, the way it is measured, and the factors that shape it.
· 3.2 Describe the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality framework and the Big Five model,
· 3.3 Discuss how the concepts of core self-evaluation (CSE), self-monitoring, and proactive personality contribute to the understanding of personality.
· 3.4 Describe how the situation affects whether personality predicts behavior.
· 3.5 Contrast terminal and instrumental values.
· 3.6 Describe the differences between person-job fit and person-organization fit.
· 3.7 Identify Hofstede’s five value dimensions and the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) framework.
Power Point
CH 5 MGMT 3721 Textbook Power Point 14th ed.pptx
Chapter Outline
CH 5 MGMT 3721 Chapter Outline 14th ed.docx
Supporting Video
CH 5 Supporting Video: Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions (Links to an external site.)
To gain a better understanding of Course Objective-3 and Chapter Learning Objective 5.7, watch the above video. Values are learned. They are passed down through generations and vary by cultures. Geert Hofstede studied the impact of culture on work-related values. In doing so, he examined the nations of the world and classified them based on the values their population shared. This video will help you understand Hofstede's dimensions of national culture.
Welcome again to take 5 with Dr. Nasco.
Today we're going to talk about Chapter 5,
personality and values.
Remember that we're talking about
individual-level behavior still so that micro-level
and our goal is to understand and predict
individual behavior and organizational behavior,
certainly in the context
of the organizational environment.
We're going to look today at personality
and values and how personality and
values do impact behavior at work.
Personality is the sum total
of ways in which an individual
reacts and interacts with others,
and we describe personality based on measurable traits.
It's the lens that we use to understand
and interpret our world.
It is how we perceive the world around us,
and then based off of that perception,
then we choose to interact with the world.
We use traits to better
understand what the personality is,
and traits are enduring characteristics that
describe an individual's behavior.
Those are the things that we can see
consistently in someone's behavior.
That is what a trait basically is.
It's an enduring characteristic of somebody's behavior.
When we say it's enduring,
it exists in many environments
and situations and in different times.
We do see that there is a lot of heredity in terms
of what our traits and personality are.
That does not mean that our behavior is not
influenced by our environment, it certainly is,
but our personality seems to be more
driven from our heredity and biological.
How do we try to understand what
a personality is and what
frameworks do we use to understand that?
Probably one that everybody is familiar
with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
It's been used extensively in education, and in business.
One of the reasons why it has
value is because so many people know
about this personality type indicator and have used it,
had taken the task,
and exposed to it in the world or that sort of thing.
There are four characteristic continuums
that classify people into
16 different personality types based
off the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator comes from
the Jungian Personality Indicator,
and then that's been further developed to become
what we know today as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
There's these four continuums that are
associated with the Myers-Briggs.
There's the extroverted or introverted continuum.
Extroverted individuals are outgoing, sociable,
and assertive and introverts are quiet and shy.
Then we have the sensing and intuitive dimension,
and that is sensing types or
practical prefer routine and order.
They focus on details.
Intuitives rely on conscious processes
and look at the big picture.
Then we had the intuited
and the thinking and feeling dimension.
Thinking types use reason and logic to handle problems,
feeling types rely on their personal values and emotions.
Then lastly, we have
the judging and perceiving dimension,
judging types one control before order,
and structure perceiving types
are flexible and spontaneous.
Like I said, most of us have
had experience with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,
had taken the test,
and have been given these four letters,
[inaudible] INTJ, or ESTP.
They've been able to determine that there are
16 different personality types
based off of this personality type indicator.
Now, the reason why we bring it up here is
because so many people have been exposed
to it and it has been used in business
extensively to put teams together to
basically just understand that we may be very
similar in terms of how we look and where
we come from and how we've been educated,
but we take this test and we realize that we're still
very different in how we
perceive and interact with the world.
So there's definite value
in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
But unfortunately,
when we will dig into the research with the Myers-Briggs,
we find that the results are unreliable.
What do we mean by that?
It doesn't have good test-retest reliability.
You can take the test and get
one score and then take the test that you're later get
a different score and to take tests
a year later and get a difference score.
We know that personality is stable and pretty consistent.
Usually that means that
personality does change a little bit over time,
but not as drastic as what we see
with the Myers-Briggs type Indicator.
That brings in the caves of how reliable is this tests.
Part of it has to do with the fact that we're put
into one of two categories.
When in reality we exist on
a continuum between extroverted or introverted.
I think that is part of the problem
with how the tests is designed,
maybe in measures itself.
Then research shows that it's also not
related very well to job performance.
Other words, we do see that people
are attracted to certain types
of positions based off of their personality.
But your personality type does not
impact your performance level
in those different job types,
so from that perspective,
it doesn't give us a lot of value.
Another personality dimension tests that
does give us a lot of value and does seem to be
more stable in terms of its reliability and validity
is that Big 5 Personality Dimensions Model
and that's often called OCEAN.
There are five dimensions
Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability,
Extroversion, Openness to Experience,
and Agreeableness or conscientiousness.
That's dimension is a measure of reliability.
For Emotional Stability, this
is dimension that taps a person
whose ability to withstand stress.
For Extroversion, that dimension captures
our comfort level with relationships.
Openness to experiments,
that dimension addresses the range of
a person's interests and their fascination with novelty.
Then we have agreeableness,
that dimension refers to an individual's propensity
to defer to others.
What we see with the recent research
is that Conscientiousness and
Agreeableness are the strongest predictors
of job performance.
If you go back to it, conscientiousness is dimension,
that is a measure of reliability.
Are you going to do what you say you're going to do?
Indeed do that consistently,
so that's why Conscientiousness seems to
be the most related to job performance.
What we do see that Agreeableness has a strong connection
too but Agreeableness can also have a negative impact.
On other words, if we're too agreeable,
what happens is is that we don't
tend to be promoted because of that
and it's interesting and we'll see when
we move here onto the dark triad,
maybe there's a connection there between that.
We also have what's called
the dark triad in terms of personality.
That's a machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopath.
Basically machiavellianism
is pragmatic emotional distance
in the ends justifies the means personality type.
Then we have the narcissism,
it's a sense of entitlement,
arrogance and grandiose sense of self.
Then psychopathy, lack of empathy and remorse for others.
What we'd see is that individuals to
have these personality dimensions,
especially machiavellianism and narcissism,
tend to have more counter productive work behaviors.
They exhibit more counterproductive work behaviors.
But what's really interesting
is that we do see that people who exhibit
these behaviors tend to be often rewarded in
organizations and are elevated
to leadership positions within an organization.
It's interesting that even though we don't view
these personalities as being productive,
certainly very individualistic and
maybe in nature in our culture,
especially here in the United States,
which isn't individualist [inaudible] talk
about a little bit later on.
We do tend to reward people who act in
these ways based off
the personality traits and
elevate them to leadership positions.
There are some other personality measures
that I think we should be aware of too.
Core Self-Evaluation, those are conclusions
about our capability, confidence, and self-worth.
That has a lot to do with self-esteem and self-efficacy.
Our belief in our global belief in ourself,
and our abilities to
perform when we are expected to do so.
Also self-monitoring, the ability
to adjust our behavior to situational factors.
For stuff monitors,
high self-monitors really care about what others
feel and think about them
so they adjust their behavior and
low self-monitors don't care as much about
that and don't tend to adjust their behaviors as much.
Then we have proactive personality,
those are people who identify opportunities,
take action, and persevere through challenges.
Certainly, we can see that people who are high in
proactive personality are most likely to
act and to see an issue and then do something about it.
Obviously people like that tend to do well in business,
and are more of entrepreneurial in nature.
We do know that there are
mitigating variables to personality,
so we do have a couple of
theories that help us to understand that.
I said to you before that your personality
is more biological and based on genetics,
but it doesn't mean that
situations and environments can't mitigate our behavior.
This situation strength theory tells us that
personality traits translate into behavior,
depends on strength and the norms, cues,
and standards that dictate behavior.
In other words, we know that culture has
a lot to do with our behavior too,
and that we tend to exhibit behavior,
especially in environments, that have strong norms,
cues, and standards of behavior.
We can mitigate or lower
the propensity of behavior occurring
based off the situation strength theory,
then we have the opposite of that,
the trait activation theory saying, hey,
certain situations can actually
activate certain traits and behaviors.
Again, we do know that the environment does work in
collaboration with our personality
to mitigate our behavior.
Then, let's look at values and what are values?
Those are basic convictions
that specific modes of conduct
are personally, or socially preferable.
How does that affect our behaviors?
We have value systems.
In other words, we don't just have one value,
we have a series of
values that we put together to create a value system.
What that means is that all of
our values are as important to us,
and have so much impact on our behavior,
and certain values take
greater importance in terms of our behavior.
We have two different basic types of values.
We have terminal values,
those are desirable end-state of existence,
then instrumental values, those are modes
of behavior to achieve those terminal values.
For example, if you have a terminal value
of social justice and
social justice is very important to us,
and then instrumental values is what
behaviors are you willing to participate
in to get that desired in state of social justice.
Maybe if you are a proactive personality type,
you might be more likely to participate
in behaviors that would lead to,
and actually lead social justice movements as an example,
so just a relevant
point that we can use to understand here today.
How do we link personality and values to the workplace?
That is ultimately our goal here.
There are some theories that do
help us to get a little bit of
a better understanding of that.
Basically, they fall into two camps.
That's the person job fit camp,
and a personal organization fit setup theories.
If we're looking at personality job fit,
we have to look at Holland's six personality types
and fit to job types.
When we look at Holland's theory,
we have six different types.
We have the realistic investigated,
the social, the conventional,
the enterprising, and the artistic.
What Holland's research has showed us is
that it actually is a pretty good predictor of,
when people take this test,
your top two personality traits are ranked.
Then it tells you what occupations are the
most likely to be a good fit for you.
What we do see is that there is some correlation between
Holland's personality types and
how people perform in those different jobs.
We can see again,
relationship between someone's personality
and maybe the types of jobs that they would
be best in and could perform the best in.
Then we have the other side of that,
which is the person-organization fit.
That is, people are attracted to and selected
by organizations with similar values.
We especially see, today I think,
arguments from both of these.
If you look at how companies hire,
they use both of these dimensions,
they definitely look at person-job fit and
give different tests and stuff to assess whether or
not someone has the type of personality and
a set of values that are going to be this successful,
hopefully, in this type of job.
Then we also have today especially younger generations.
People really being in organizations,
younger organizations to being
focused on bringing people into the organization who
have a similar set of values
and people wanting to work for
organizations that have a similar set of
values and that they're more likely to be
comfortable and successful in
an organization that has a similar set of values.
In other words, it's not just that the person can do
the job and that's important for
the person job fit on perspective,
but also they'll fit well into
the environment and with others in that same environment,
so we find that both those dimensions are very important.
Then last but certainly not least for today,
we also would be remiss if we did not talk about
international cultural values and
differences. Why is this important?
We have this little bit the same that was
sometimes using our organizational behavior.
That is the cultural values or
country values values eat corporate values for lunch.
What do I mean by that?
Basically just means is that we have
found that our country cultures,
where we grow up,
the countries that we grow up in too
have a lot of impact on our behavior
and the values that we develop from
those cultures that we grow up in.
That country culture is actually stronger than
corporate culture in terms of
determining someone's behavior at work.
What that means is that,
corporations actually are forced to adjust
their cultures to hire
people and have operations in other countries.
The two frameworks that we're most familiar with here are
Hofstede's framework and the GLOBE framework
that build on Hofstede's framework.
Hofstede's framework is based
off these five value dimensions.
For example, power distance
that describes the degree to which people in
a country accept that power in
institutions is distributed unequally.
Our ability to accept that power in
institutions and organizations is actually
distributed unequally that would be power distance.
Then we have individualism versus collectivism.
Lot of people know that because obviously in
the United States we have an individualistic culture
and China,
for example, that's more of a collectivist culture.
So individualism is the degree to
which people prefer to act as
individuals rather than members of groups
and believe in individuals rights above all else,
collectivism emphasizes a tight social framework
which people accept others and
groups [inaudible] to look after them and protect then.
We also have masculinity and femininity,
uncertainty avoidance in long-term
versus short term orientation.
I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about these.
These are very important
and my lack of talking about them
does not mean that they're not important and they
certainly are based off what I just said before.
It's just a lot to go over in this chapter.
I don't want to spend too much time to go to the because
that's the goal to try to keep these around 15 minutes.
The GLOBE framework is important because
it built on Hofstede's framework.
I'll validate how Hofstede's framework and found that
those five dimensions do exist in their research.
I actually found four additional dimension
that were added to
Hofstede's work and found that there are maybe
a total nine different cultural value dimensions
that we should be aware of.
As managers and leaders,
we need to be aware of the fact that, hey,
all of us have different personalities
and those personalities do affect how
we view and judge the world around us and
perceive that world and then interact with that world.
Then our behaviors are mitigated by things
like whether or not we want to
adjust those behaviors based off of how
important it is to us to be perceived in
a certain way or to be member of a group.
That's basically what we need to understand
about personalities and values,
is that we have
our personalities that do
impact how we view and interact with the world.
We do have values that also impact that.
Then basically in the environments
that we set up that work,
those can either mitigate or reinforce
those different personality dimensions
within individuals.
That can help us to better understand how people
will act in the workplace.
Again, hopefully predict and
understand behavior. Thanks, take care.
Course Objective
CO-3. Identify themes that influence a person's perception and decision-making process.
Chapter 6 Learning Objectives
· 3.8 Explain the factors that influence perception.
· 3.9 Describe attribution theory.
· 3.10 Explain the link between perception and decision making.
· 3.11 Contrast the rational model of decision making with bounded rationality and intuition.
· 3.12 Explain how individual differences and organizational constraints affect decision making.
· 3.13 Contrast the three ethical decision criteria.
· 3.14 Describe the three-stage model of creativity.
Power Point
CH 6 MGMT 3721 Textbook Power Point 14th ed.pptx
Chapter Outline
CH 6 MGMT 3721 Chapter Outline 14th ed.docx
Supporting Video
Unconscious Bias at Work - Making the Unconscious Conscious (3:58 minutes) (YouTube)
Welcome again to Take 5 with Dr. Nasco.
This is going to be over Chapter 6,
Perception and Individual Decision Making.
All right.
Again, we're still looking at
the micro level of understanding behavior.
We're looking at individual behavior still,
and I guess the best way to
understand what we're doing in this chapter today is
it's how people see each other and then ultimately how
well we can work together based
off how we see each other.
Let's talk about perception.
Perception is the process by
which we organize, interpret,
understand, and give meaning to our environment,
and to the world around us.
Perception, I think actually just
personifies what we are as human beings.
We seek to understand what is going
on around us in our world and to make sense of it.
I literally even had someone say to me this morning,
I'm just not getting what is the meaning of life.
Something that someone said to me this morning,
so that is the essence of the human condition.
We just have to try to understand and interpret what's
going on around us and make
sense of what's going on around us.
That's the human condition.
But the reality I guess is,
is that we perceive things very differently.
All of us do it, so we can look at
the same events but perceive them very differently.
I can't remember if this was
a marriage therapist or
divorce attorney who said
this to me at some point along the way,
but like in a marriage,
and this was the quote, "In a marriage,
there is what he thinks is the truth,
what she thinks is the truth,
and then the truth."
That's the reality of the situation.
A perception can be very
different from reality for most of us.
We perceive the world very differently in
that perception is what becomes our reality.
One of the things that's important to
us in organizational behaviors,
that individuals behavior is based on
their perceptions of reality,
not on reality itself.
Many times as managers and leaders,
we see the outcomes, we see behaviors,
but we don't necessarily understand
what's behind those behaviors and
certainly how people perceive
things has a lot to do with their behavior.
Just giving really a quick example,
if your employees perceive you as not being fair in
terms of how you distribute the workload for employees.
In other words, you're maybe
giving favoritism to some people
in terms of workload and not favoritism to others.
If that is how somebody perceives it,
whether that's reality or not,
that will change their behavior.
Maybe that person will participate in
more counterproductive work behaviors as an example,
because that's what they perceive is happening,
even though other people may not perceive it that way.
We have to look at what factors influence perception.
Well, there's three factors
that can affect perception that we need to be aware of.
The factors of the perceiver,
the target, and the context.
In other words, the perceiver,
the person who's actually
perceiving what's going on in the environment,
that perception is affected by things that
we've talked about in the past, like attitudes,
values, personality, their motivations,
and their past experiences.
Then the target, what is it that
we're viewing in the environment?
We don't just view that target.
I just said we're viewing in the environment,
it's their relationship of that target to
the environment to that helps us
to perceive things in certain ways,
or maybe allows us to perceive things in certain ways.
In other words, is this behavior that we're
witnessing considered to be normal or standard,
or unique and different in this particular environment.
Then also contexts.
Things like time, location,
and situational factors are
also an influence our perceptions of what's occurring.
For example, how somebody dresses.
If we see them in the work world or if
we see them at home at dinner,
and how they dress with one context whoever you think of,
that's perfectly normal in other contexts,
we may look back and say, oh,
that's not normal or that's unique and different.
Don't want to say normal, but you get the point.
We do look at those.
We do look at the context,
the target in relation to their context,
and then obviously our inputs
into the process in terms of our attitudes, values,
and personality and affect how we
perceive what's going on around us.
How do we make these judgments about others?
Well, attribution theory helps us to
understand that and its attempt to understand
behavior's internally caused or externally caused.
We have an observation,
we then interpret what we're seeing,
and then we make an attribution
as to what the cause is of that behavior.
Is that internally caused or externally caused?
There are three things that we use to
help us to understand that.
For distinctiveness,
is that behavior exhibited
in many different environments.
Let's give you just a simple, basic example.
Let's say the person is late to work.
We might look how distinct is that?
In other words, is that behavior exhibited in
many different ways and in many different environments?
You might say, they were late to work.
Well, this person is also commonly late to
meetings and commonly late submitting their assignments.
In other words, that is a distinct behavior,
it actually occurs at many
different times and environments.
That would be one that might be
something that would be a cue to us to say,
that's an internally driven cause,
not an externally driven cause. Then consensus.
Well, that person was late.
Well, Was anybody else late that morning?
Well, it turns out that
about a third of the office was late that morning.
Well, then maybe something else is going on
here that maybe would be a third of the people were late,
then that's a higher probability that there was
an external cause or an internal cause.
Then consistency.
Do we see this behavior a lot in the same environment?
In other words, is this the first time
this person has been late to work
or is this the third time that
week that this person's been late to work?
All those things are cues to us in
our mind as to whether or not the behavior is
internally driven or externally driven.
Well, one of the things that's
interesting with attribution error
is the fundamental attribution error.
That's the tendency to overestimate
internal factors when judging behavior of others.
In other words, when someone's
late as a manager and a leader,
we tend to say,
they're late because they got up late.
They're lazy, that's just who they are.
In other words, internally driven.
What's interesting about
the fundamental attribution error
is that when people are successful,
we tend not to give them as much credit for it.
Sometimes we say they were lucky.
It's an external cause.
Very interestingly enough though,
we may do this with others
in terms of the fundamental attribution error,
but we do the exact opposite with
ourselves when we come back to self-serving bias.
In other words, we attribute our successes
to our own internal factors and
attribute our failures to external factors.
This is important again as managers because one of
the errors that we constantly just make,
we're not even really thinking about
subconscious is that we
don't look at the environment as much and say,
well, is this actually an externally caused,
environmentally caused behavior, or is this
an actually internal motivation attitude
that's causing this behavior as an example.
What are some of the common shortcuts that we
use in judging others?
Well, one of the things that we know is that
we have what's called selective perception.
Anybody who's ever been in a marriage
would be probably would say,
what if you maybe had teenagers?
This is a great example.
You say yes, I can see
the perception. I see it every day in my life.
That's the tendency to selectively interpret
what we see based on interests,
background, experience, and others.
In other words, we don't see everything.
We filter the world around us.
We choose what we want to see
and choose what we don't want to see.
Another common shortcut of judging
others is the halo effect.
That's the tendency to draw a general impression
on the basis of a single characteristic.
Now this is a little bit
different than stereotyping because
that characteristic tends to
be an individual characteristic.
A lot of times you're going to hear
the halo effect when we talk about
like a single positive characteristic,
then overshadowing everything else
about that person and maybe a single
negative characteristic that that person
would be overshadowing everything else.
That would be the horns effect.
Stereotyping is different because
that judgment is based on the perception of the group in
which that person belongs
to or that we can precede that they belong to.
That's the difference in the shortcut in terms of judging
others between the halo effect and stereotyping.
Then the contrast effect.
This isn't a great example of this,
is not interviewing or whatever, or competitions.
That doesn't mean that someone is
not performing well and they
couldn't do the job or fit into the organization.
We have to enforce them, evaluate people and put them in.
We talked about people
and we have to evaluate them between
candidate number 1 all the way down
to make a candidate number 5.
That's then the contrast effect that
we use in judging others too.
What's the link between perception and decision making?
One of the areas that it starts with is just
even in the perception of a problem.
One person perceives that a problem exists and
the other person perceives
that there's no problem there at
all. What is a problem?
That's a discrepancy between
the current state and some new desired state.
Well, if one person sees everything is fine
and everything that's happening now is okay,
then they don't see a problem.
They don't see a different desired state,
whereas another person sees a different desired state.
They see a problem or
they defined something as a problem.
That's where it starts with decision-making is,
doesn't problem even exist.
What do we define that problem as.
Then we have to make decisions and those are choices
from 2 or more alternatives.
Decision making occurs as a reaction to a problem.
Well, how do we make decisions?
Well, you could spend an entire course talking
about decision-making and we
don't have the time to do that here.
There are 3 basic models that can
help us.1 is the rational model.
The rational model would be
a 6 step process that we might
all go through to make a decision.
We'd starts with 1,
defining the problem and goes all the way down to 6,
selecting the best alternative.
But what really happens in
reality is that most of the time,
we rarely go through
this formal step-by-step model to make decisions.
That's just not how most people make
decisions or most businesses make decisions.
What really tends to happen
is more likely to occur in terms
of bounded rationality and satisficing and intuition.
What is bounded rationality and satisficing?
Well, it's limiting the amount
of information and limiting
the criteria to create
a simple model to make a sufficient decision.
It's not about getting at the best decision,
whereas the rational model should lead
us to the absolute best decision,
but what really happens is that we have
limited capacity intellectually as
individuals and our brains have limited capacity,
many of the problems that we deal with are quite complex.
We create a simplified model
for us to understand the problem.
In other words, we focus in on
very specific information in
various specific criteria to evaluate that information.
Then we use that subset to help us to make
a good decision or a sufficient decision,
maybe not the best decision.
Many of us make decisions that
way by using bounded rationality.
Then we have intuition.
I know I mentioned in the previous lecture once or twice,
that our brain has two basic different parts to it.
One part that is the logic center of
the brain and the other part that is
the emotional center of the brain.
Well, intuition comes from
that emotional center of the brain.
When people say, "Why
do you want to do this or why do you
think that's the best decision?"
They'll just say, "I don't know,
it just feels right."
Actually, that is a pretty
accurate interpretation of what that person
is how they're truly making that decision.
They're making a decision based off maybe their past
and their experience from the past.
There is some logic there,
but when people say like it just feels right,
you'll remember that the emotional part of
our brains actually lacks language.
It doesn't have language, it has emotion.
That's what we mean by saying that we use intuition,
we're using our feelings, our guts,
our distilled experience from the past.
We'd create some heuristics
to help us to make those decisions.
Well, what we found is that
the best decisions are probably lines for
most individuals between using
bounded rationality and intuition
together to make good decisions.
But we can see in business today there
certainly a lot of focus on data analytics,
data modeling, and that sort of thing,
where the goal is to step back into use research and
data to try to make
the best decisions because we
have limited intellectual capacity,
but computers have much more capacity
to take much larger sets of information,
much larger sets of criteria,
and use those models to be able to
make hopefully better decisions.
I think we can take that and
combine that with things like
our intuition and past
distilled experience to make good decisions.
When we make decisions,
we have to understand that biases and
errors enter into decision making.
There are all kinds of biases and errors that
can enter into decision making.
Again, if you take
a psychology course, or whenever you'll get,
or an organizational behavior course like this,
we could spend a little bit of time
talking about the that,
but unfortunately, we don't have
a lot of time to do that.
The common areas are things just being
overconfident in the decisions that we make.
Anchoring, in other words,
the first pieces of information that we have tend
to anchor our thought process and it
makes us hard to get off of
those first pieces of information and
look at other pieces of information.
We already are having an attitude or a belief in place,
so then we believe things to be a certain way.
Then we look for information to confirm that and
then disregard information that doesn't confirm that.
Availability, a great example
of availability is you do a Google search.
You're more likely to be influenced by
those first 10 hits that you're going to
get in your Google search than on the
1,000 that's on the page.
Now, that would be an example of availability bias.
Information that we can actively get to is
the information that we're going to
more likely use to help us to make that decision.
Randomness is then just
creating a sense of what or whether is none.
Remember, I've said to you many
times that one of the things that we want to do
in organizational behavior is to try to predict behavior.
Well, sometimes you can't predict what
would have happened if what
happened was completely random.
Then the hindsight bias, which I love,
which is the tendency to believe
falsely after an outcome of
an event is actually known that one would have
been accurately predicted the outcome beforehand.
That's though I knew that all along thing.
Well, the reality is, is
that we don't know that all along.
There's a great quote in the book by Malcolm Gladwell,
"What is clear in hindsight is
rarely clear before the fact."
That's the hindsight bias.
There are certainly other mitigating variables and
factors that we've already talked about before,
like personality and attitudes and values.
But also things like gender,
our general mental ability has things to do with,
in terms of bounded rationality,
we all don't have the same capacity
to carry the same amount of
information and then process that information
at the same amount of speeds in our brain.
Maybe if we are able to handle more pieces of
information in our brain
and process that information more quickly,
then we may be able to get a better decision
than somebody else because of that.
Then there are all kinds of culture and
organizational constraints that
also impact our decision-making.
Again, we don't have as much time in
this course and this chapter
to go over this topic widely.
But there are things like reward systems and
evaluation systems that occur
within organizations, in other words,
compensation systems and then the evaluation systems
that we use to rate the employees.
Maybe your yearly performance evaluation,
those kinds of things.
Those have a lot large impact on our behavior at work
and they have as much impact as an error,
or biases, or our perception of reality.
The last thing that I want to
talk about, it's from the book today,
is ethics in decision making and creativity,
and how we can tie some of these other things together.
When we're talking about ethics in decision-making,
I think two basic things that we need to look at,
decision criteria and the situational context.
We know that those two things are huge.
In other words, in our decision criteria,
do we focus on things like utilitarianism,
the greatest good for the greatest number?
That's an outcomes-based ethics decision-making process.
Or do we focus on things like lights,
respecting, and protecting the basic rights of people?
Or do we focus on the criteria such as justice,
our ability to impose and enforce
rules fairly and impartially,
equity, in terms of treatment of each other?
If you think about it,
team and governments tend to make decisions that are
utilitarianism based and focus on
making the greatest good
for the greatest number of people.
But if you think about what's
going on in our world today,
it seems to be that there's more of
a focus on rights and justice in terms of
the criteria that people want to use as it
relates to ethics and ethical behavior,
and we feel that those are
better decision criteria than utilitarianism.
Last but certainly which I already
mentioned, the situational contexts.
In other words, we don't make decisions in isolation.
We make those decisions in environmental contexts.
Those contexts do in
fact mitigate and change our decisions.
In other words, we may change our behavior
in the workplace because we know we're going to
be rewarded for that behavior.
We may have not normally exhibited that behavior.
We may have not exhibited that behavior outside of work,
but we exhibited at work because
it benefits us financially when we do
that or we make certain types of
decisions that may benefit us financially as an example.
All right. How does this lead to maybe
the last topic of creativity?
If you think about it,
creativity also has to do with things like
these decision criteria that are used and
the averseness of the consideration set
of the amount of different ideas
that are going to be available.
What is creativity? It's the ability to produce
novel and useful ideas or innovation,
is a term that's used a lot in the workplace.
Creativity is getting that new and novel idea.
Innovation is actually useful to us.
Well, what we do notice is that there
is things that can't be done in terms of a process.
We can create a potential environment
where creativity is expected and rewarded,
and then we get creative behavior,
and then hopefully creative outcomes.
That creative behavior is the process
P. What happens with creative behavior,
there is a creative model where there are
four steps of things that have to basically occur,
that is, a formation of the problem.
How we define the problem
and the creativity involved and how we
actually define what a problem is,
and then how creative we are
in terms of gathering information,
how we generate possible solutions and then ideas,
and then how effective we are at actually
evaluating those ideas in terms
of their ability to be useful innovations
and then applied that way.
That is how a decision-making
relates to the idea of creativity.
Just one last quick thought
before we go because I just thought it was
interesting because there's lots things
that you can talk about
creativity as it relates to ethics in decision making.
But there does seem to be a link between
creativity and dishonesty and unethical behavior,
and that has a lot to do with,
or we think it has a lot to do with people's ability
to come up with rational decisions about their behavior.
The more creative they are in terms of
being able to rationalize the behaviors
that [inaudible] more likely they are to get involved
in possible unethical behavior.
All right. Again, at a really high level today,
we just looked at perceptions,
decision-making, and again, at
a really high level ethics in the workplace.