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Organizational Behaviour-Session 5 & 6 Personality & Attitude, Personality Vs Environment, Organizational Commitment Key words- Personality theories , Nature & dimension of attitudes Reference – Organizational Behaviour by Luthans, Fred, McGraw Hill, ISBN 0-07-113473-5; pp.113-132 Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

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Page 1: 5,6- Personality & Attitudes Readonly

Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Organizational Behaviour-Session 5 & 6

Personality & Attitude, Personality Vs Environment, Organizational Commitment

Key words- Personality theories , Nature & dimension ofattitudes

Reference – Organizational Behaviour by Luthans, Fred, McGraw Hill, ISBN 0-07-113473-5; pp.113-132

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Personality & Attitudes

Personality & Attitudes are two very popular and important factors (constructs) that

describe & analyze organizational behavior.

Personality & Attitudes, both are very complex.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Personality• There are various descriptions of personality and there

has not been a universal agreement on the exact meaning of this term.

• Personality would mean how people affect others and how they understand & view themselves, as well as their pattern of inner & outer measurable traits, and the person-situation interaction.

• How people affect others depends primarily upon their external appearance (height, weight, facial features, color etc.) and traits.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Personality traits• Various types of personality traits have been identified and

mentioned by different personality theorists in different studies.

• The major traits can be summarized as-Traits Constructs

Extraversion Sociable, talkative, assertive

Agreeableness Good-natured, cooperative, trusting

Conscientiousness Responsible, dependable, persistent, achievement-oriented

Emotional stability Viewed from a negative standpoint, tense, insecure, nervous

Openness to experience Imaginative, artistically sensitive, intellectual

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Other ingredients of personality

• Besides physical appearance & personality traits, the aspects of personality dealing with self-concept (both self-esteem & self-efficacy) and the person-situation interaction also play important roles.

• Ingredients of Personality– Physical appearance– Personality traits– The self-concept: self-esteem & self-efficacy– Person-situation interaction

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The self-concept: self-esteem & self-efficacy

• People’s attempts to understand themselves are called the self-concept in personality theory.

• The self is a unique product of many interacting parts and may be thought of as the personality viewed from within. This self is relevant to the concept of self-esteem & self-efficacy.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The self-concept: self-esteem & self-efficacy contd.

• People’s self-esteem is related to their self-perceived competence and self-image.

• Self-efficacy is concerned with self-perception of how well a person can cope with situations as they arise. Those with high self-efficacy feel capable and confident of performing well in a situation.

• Both self-esteem & self-efficacy have been found to have empirical relationship with organizational performance and other dynamics of organizational behavior.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Person-situation interaction

• Each situation is different. • The differences may seem to be very small, but

when the information / stimuli from situation / event are organized and interpreted by a person, there could be major differences and diverse behavioral outcomes.

• This is due to cultural, social educational, economic background and cognition of the person.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Development of personality & socialization

• Human beings consists of both physiological & psychological interacting parts. Therefore, heredity, environment, maturation and learning all contribute to the human personality.

• The study of personality attempts to identify specific physiological & psychological stages that occur in the development of human personality.

• This “stage” approach has been theoretical in nature.

• There are many well-known stage theories of personality development. (although there is little agreement about the exact stages).

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Development of personality & socialization contd.

• There are different view. • Some theorist state that there are no identifiable

stages and that personality development is a continuous process based on the learning opportunities available.

• Others state that there are identifiable stages. • Popular theories for understanding OB are given

by Levinson, Douglas T. Hall, Chris Argyris, Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Development of personality & socialization contd.Adult Life Stages

• Daniel Levinson has done appreciable work on adult life stages.

• He believed that humans have different life stages. “Life structure evolves through a relatively orderly sequence throughout the adult years,”.

• His theory was age based and not event based (marriage, parenthood, retirement etc.).

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Adult Life Stages contd.

• Levinson believed that there was little variability (a maximum of 2-3 years) in four identifiable stable periods:– Entering the adult world (age twenty-two to twenty-eight)– Settling down (ages thirty-three to forty)– Entering middle adulthood (ages forty-five to fifty)– Culmination of middle adulthood (ages fifty-five to sixty)

• He identified four transitional periods:– Age-thirty transition (ages twenty-eight to thirty-three)– Mid-life transition (ages forty to forty-five)– Age-fifty transition (ages fifty to fifty-five)– Late adult transition (ages sixty to sixty-five)

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Douglas T. Hall’s career stage model

• Hall has synthesized Levinson’s theory & other adult stage theories (in particular the work of Erikson & Donald Super) into an overall model of four career stages.

Exploration The young employee is searching for an identity; undergoes self-examination & role tryouts.

Establishment The employee begins to settle down and indicates a need for intimacy. This is usually a growing, productive period in employee’s career.

Maintenance The person level offs into a highly productive plateau and has a need for generativity (the concern to leave something to the next generation; developing a paternalistic or mentor role towards subordinates)

Decline The person indicates a need for integrity; he needs to feel satisfied with his or her life choices and overall career.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Hall’s carrier stage model

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The Argyris Immaturity-Maturity Continuum

• Avoiding the strict stage approach, Argyris identified specific dimensions of the human personality as it develops.

• Argyris proposes that the human personality, rather than going through precise stages, progresses along a continuum from immaturity as an infant to maturity as an adult.

• However, at any age, people can have their degree of development plotted according to the seven dimensions as given in the following table.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The Argyris Immaturity-Maturity Continuum contd.

Immaturity Characteristics Maturity CharacteristicsPassivity ActivityDependence IndependenceFew ways of behaving Diverse behaviorShallow interests Deep interestsShort time perspective Long time perspectiveSubordinate position Super-ordinate positionLack of awareness Self-awareness and control

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Argyris model contd.

• Argyris points out that the model does not imply that all persons reach or strive for all dimensions on the mature end of the continuum.

• According to him-– The seven dimensions represent only one aspect of the total

personality. Much also depends upon the individual’s perception, self-concept, adaptation & adjustment.

– The seven dimensions continually change in degree from the infant to the adult end of the continuum.

– The model being only a construct, cannot predict specific behavior– The seven dimensions are based upon latent characteristics of the

personality, which may be quite different from the observable behavior.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Argyris model contd.

• In contrast to the class stage theories of Freud & Erikson, Argyris’s model of personality is specifically directed to the study and analysis of organizational behavior.

• He assumes that the personalities of organizational employees can be generally described by the mature end of continuum.

• At the same time, Argyris also comments that in many cases a mature organizational participant becomes frustrated and anxious and is in conflict with the modern formal organization.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The socialization process

• Besides the developmental aspects of personality, there is increasing recognition to the role of other relevant persons, groups and organizations, which greatly influence an individual’s personality.

• This continuous impact from the social environment is commonly called the socialization process.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Socialization process contd.

• Socialization is especially relevant to OB because the process is not confined to early childhood; rather it takes place throughout one’s life.

• Socialization may be one of the best explanations for why employees behave the way they do in today’s organizations.

• Different patterns of socialization leads to different forms of newcomer adjustment to organizations.

• Socialization starts with the initial contact between a mother and her new born baby. After infancy, other members of the immediate family (father, brothers, sisters), close relatives, family friends & then social groups (peers, school friends, members of the work group) play influential roles.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Socialization process contd.

• According to Schein, “Organization itself also contributes to socialization”.

• Following are widely accepted characteristics of organizational socialization of employees– Change of attitudes, values & behaviors– continuity of socialization over time– adjustment to new jobs, work groups & organizational

practices– mutual influence between recruits and their managers– criticality of the early socialization period.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Nature & dimensions of attitudes• Both personality & attitudes are complex cognitive processes.

• Personality is thought of as the whole process and attitudes may make up the personality.

• Attitudes can be defined as a persistent tendency to feel and behave in a particular way toward some object.

• Attitudes can be characterized in three ways

They tend to persist unless something is done to change them

They can anywhere along a continuum from very favorable to very unfavorable.

They are directed towards some object

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

3 basic components of attitudesEMOTIONAL

Involves the person’s feelings, or affect the positive, neutral or negative feelings about an object.

INFORMATIONAL

Consists of the beliefs and information the individual has about the object. It makes no difference whether or not this information is empirically real or correct.

BEHAVIORAL

Consists of a persons tendencies to behave in a particular way toward an object.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Antecedents of Work-related attitudes• Antecedents of attitudes include a preceding circumstance, event,

object, style, phenomenon that affects the attitudes or the attitudes can be determined by them.

• Traditionally, the situational determinants of attitudes received the most attention. Salancik and Pfeffer noted that the social context provided information to the employees to form their feelings, or affect their job-related attitudes.

• More recently, personality traits or dispositions have been receiving increasing attention as antecedents of work-related attitudes.

• In particular, the dispositions of POSITIVE AFFECTIVITY (PA) and NEGATIVE AFFECTIVITY (NA) have been found to be important antecedents to attitudes about one’s job.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

NEGATIVE AFFECTIVITY (NA)

• NA reflects a personality disposition to experience negative emotional states; those with high NA tend to feel nervous, tense, anxious, worried, upset and distressed.

• Thus, those with high NA are more likely to experience negative affective states – they are more likely to have a negative attitude towards themselves, others and the world around them.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

POSITIVE AFFECTIVITY (PA)

• Those with high PA have the opposite disposition and tend to have an overall sense of well-being, see themselves as pleasurably and effectively engaged, and tend to experience positive attitudes.

• Such PA and NA states are important in understanding job satisfaction and work stress.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Functions of attitudes• Understanding of functions of attitudes is important to

the study of OB for many reasons-– Attitudes help predict work behavior – Attitudes help people adapt to their work environment.

• Daniel Katz has noted that attitudes serve four important purposes in this process-– The adjustment function– The ego-defensive function– The value-expressive function– The knowledge function

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The adjustment function of attitudes• Attitudes often help people adjust to their work

environment.

• When employees are well-treated, they are likely to develop a positive attitude towards supervision and the organization.

• When employees are criticized or rebuked and not given appropriate salary, they tend to develop negative attitude towards supervision and the organization.

• These attitudes help employees adjust to their environment and a basis for future behaviors.

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The ego-defensive function of attitude

• Attitudes help employees defend their self-images.

• This may surface in the form of blaming others, disliking or even harassing younger employees who are more smart, intelligent and challenge the senior manager’s decisions.

• The senior manager will develop a negative attitude towards the younger manager, who will, at the same time, feel that the senior is incompetent and is not doing his job well.

Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The value-expressive function of attitude

• Attitudes provide people with a basis for expressing their values.

• People with strong work ethics tend to voice attitudes toward specific individuals or work practices as means of reflecting this value.– Hard-work, punctuality, honesty, integrity,

truthfulness………….

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The knowledge function of attitude

• Attitudes help supply standards and frames of reference that allow people to organize and explain the world around them.

• Regardless of how accurate a person’s view of reality is, attitudes toward people, events and objects help individual make sense out of what is going on.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Changes in attitudes• Employees attitudes can be changed. Management tries

to bring a favorable change in employees’ attitudes.

• Two basic barriers to attitude change-1. Prior commitments which occurs when people feel a

commitment to a particular course of action and are unwilling to change. Researches also support ‘Escalation of commitment’ which is the tendency for decision makers to persist with failing courses of action.

2. Insufficient information is another barrier. People do not see any reason to change their attitude.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Some ways of overcoming the barriers to changing attitudes

• Providing new information• Use of fear• Resolving discrepancies• Influence of friends or peers• The coopting approach

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Overcoming the barriers to changing attitudes (1)

Providing new information• Information can change a person’s beliefs, and in this

process, his / her attitudes also.

Use of fear• Fear can people to change their attitudes. However,

the degree of fear is important to the final outcome. Low levels of fear may be easily ignored by people, and high degrees of fear makes a person reject or refuse the situation / action / message in question.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Overcoming the barriers to changing attitudes (2)

Resolving discrepancies• Attitudes can be changed by resolving discrepancies

between attitudes and behavior. For example, research shows that when job applicants have more than one offer of employment and are forced to choose, they often feel that their final choice may have been a mistake.

• This mild conflict or dissonance does not usually last very long. The theory of cognitive dissonance says that people will try to actively reduce the dissonance by attitude and behavior change.

• The result may be that the new employees conclude they have actually made right choice.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Overcoming the barriers to changing attitudes (3)

Influence of friends or peers• Persuasion from friends or peers is another way of changing

attitudes. It is important to note that when a particular matter is of personal interest to people, they are likely to reject extreme discrepancies between their current behavior and that of others.

The coopting approach• Attitude change also takes place by coopting. This means taking

people who are dissatisfied with a situation and getting them involved in improving things. (For example, formation of various committees). The committee members begin realizing how these benefits are determined and how the committee works to ensure that the people are given best benefits possible. This process changes their attitude.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Job satisfaction&

Organizational commitment

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Job satisfaction

• A pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job or job experience.

• It is a result of employees’ perception of how well their job provides those things which are viewed as important.

• In OB, job satisfaction is the most important & frequently studied attitude.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The three important dimensions to job satisfaction

job satisfaction is an emotional response

to a job situation.As such it can not

be seen; it can only be inferred.

job satisfaction is often determined

by how well outcomes meet or

exceed expectations.

job satisfaction represents attitude

toward the job.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Organizational commitment

• The job satisfaction attitude has received the most attention over years.

• There is a very strong relationship between satisfaction & commitment. Researches have found that commitment causes satisfaction.

• However, most studies treat satisfaction and commitment differently and specially in light of the “downsizing syndrome” of modern organization, commitment deserves special attention.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Meaning of organizational commitment• As an attitude, organizational commitment is defined as –

– A strong desire to remain a member of a particular organization– A willingness to exert high levels of effort on behalf of the

organization– A definite belief in, and acceptance of, the values and goals of

the organization.

• Thus, organizational commitment is an attitude about employees’ loyalty to their organization and is an ongoing process through which organizational participants express their concern for the organization and its continued success & well-being.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The multi-dimensional nature of organizational commitment

• The organizational commitment attitude is determined by a number of – personal (age, tenure in the organization, and dispositions

such as positive or negative affectivity, or internal or external control attributions) and

– organizational (the job design and the leadership style of one’s supervisor) variables.

• Even non-organizational factors such as the availability of alternatives after making the initial choice to join an organization, will affect subsequent commitment.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Three-component model of organizational commitment by Meyer and Allen

Affective commitment

Continuance commitment

Normativecommitment

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

Three-component model

Affective commitment involves the employee’s emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the

organization.

Continuance commitment involves commitment based on

the costs that the employee associates

with leaving the organization.

NormativeCommitment involves

the employee’s feelings of obligation to stay

with the organization.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The outcomes of organizational commitment

• As is the case with job satisfaction ,there are mixed outcomes of organizational commitment.

• Researches support a positive relationship between organizational commitment & desirable outcomes such as performance, turnover and absenteeism. Employee commitment relates to other desirable outcomes, such as the perception of a warm, supportive organizational climate.

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Harleen Sahni, Assistant Professor, NIFT Gandhinagar

The outcomes of organizational commitment

• At the same time, some studies do not show strong or any relationship between commitment and outcome variables, and there may be problems defining and interpreting commitment.

• Most researchers agree that organizational commitment attitude is a better predictor of outcome variables than is job satisfaction.