Complete the below assignment - MA 3

Running head: Discussion Week 3 2

Organizational Behavior

Melanie Fore

University of the Cumberlands

Introduction

At the very beginning of this course the authors stated the core topics of organizational behavior are motivation, leader behavior and power, interpersonal communication, group structure and processes, attitude development and perception, change processes, conflict and negotiation, and work design. This week’s reading goes into depth of a couple of those topics: perception and motivation.

Chapter Six

Chapter six defines for us what perception is, “a process by which we organize and interpret sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.” There are a few factors that shape our perception, perceiver, target, and context. Our perception of people often come from our first impressions of them, we don’t get to know them. This is because of four shortcuts people take in judging someone. First, is selective perception, this means people judge based on their interest and background. Next, the halo effect, where people judge on a single characteristic. The contrast effects are where individuals compare someone who has a distinctive characteristic to others you know with the same characteristics. And lastly, is stereotyping. We know from previous chapters that stereotyping is based on the group to which someone belongs. When someone makes a decision, it is based on their perception. Generally, in organizational behavior there are three things that determine what kind of decision someone makes. One is the rational model. This is where someone decides, after they know all the information, on the option that has the highest utility. Bounded rationality is another. This means the person making the decision doesn’t know all of the information, but they can construct models that extract the essential features. Finally, there is intuition. This is where someone doesn’t know all the information, but they make their decision based on experience. There are several biases that can take place in decision making, these include overconfidence bias, anchoring bias, confirmation bias, availability bias, and hindsight bias. Along with biases, there are errors as well. These are escalation of commitment, randomness error, and risk aversion. Your decisions influence you as an individual and your organization. One of the most important things to know in any career and something that is taught in almost every class are ethics and that is also covered in the end of chapter six.

Chapter Seven

Chapter 7 and 8 cover the motivation topic of organizational behavior. Our authors define motivation as “the processes that account for an individual’s intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal.” Chapter seven is full of motivation theories. The early theories included, the hierarchy of needs, two-factor theory, and McClelland’s theory of needs. The hierarchy of needs include five needs: physiological, safety-security, social-belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization. The two-factor theory, the two factors are hygiene and motivation. McClelland’s theory of needs includes the need for achievement, power, and affiliation. Contemporary theories of motivation are also discussed, these include self-determination theory, goal-setting theory, self-efficacy theory, reinforcement theory, equity theory, and expectancy theory. You can understand self-determination theory and goal-setting theory from their names. Self-efficacy theory means an individual is trying to make them believe they can perform a task by using either enactive mastery, vicarious modeling, verbal persuasion, or arousal. Reinforcement theory is based on behavior. Equity theory is where someone compares their inputs and outcomes to others. And expectancy theory focuses on three relationships, effort-performance, performance-reward, and rewards-personal goals.

Chapter Eight

We continue to learn about motivation in chapter eight. Job design is used to motivate employees. The job characteristic model includes five core job dimensions: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback. Jobs can be redesigned by job rotation (moving an employee from one task to another periodically) or relational job design (focuses on the lives that are affected by the employee’s work). Managers choose different ways to motivate their employees, some do it by involvement and participation, some do it by rewards, and some do it by benefits. Some examples of involvement and participation include participative management and representative participation. Some rewards include price-rate pay, merit-based pay, bonuses, profit-sharing plans, and employee stock ownership plans. And benefits differ between employees.

Conclusion

After this week’s reading, I have increased my knowledge in perception and motivation. The most important thing about perception is that you have to be careful and avoid the biases when making a decision about someone. Also, I need to strive every day to come to work motivated to get things done.

Running head: Discussion Forum Week 2 1 References

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. (2018). Essentials of organizational behavio r. Harlow: Pearson

Education.