CHAPTER 11

MANAGING INDIVIDUAL
DIFFERENCES & BEHAVIOR
Supervising People as
People

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 LEARNING OBJECTIVES
11.1 Describe the importance of personality and individual
traits in the hiring process.
11.2 Explain the effects of values and attitudes on employee
behavior.
11.3 Describe the way perception can cloud judgement.
11.4 Explain how managers can deal with employee attitudes.
11.5 Identify trends in workplace diversity that managers
should be aware of.
11.6 Discuss the sources of workplace stress and ways to
reduce it.
11.7 Describe how to develop the career readiness
competencies of positive approach and emotional
intelligence.
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 PERSONALITY and INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR
Personality
• The stable psychological traits and behavioral attributes
that give a person his or her identity.

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 The BIG FIVE PERSONALITY DIMENSIONS
Personality Dimensions
Extroversion Outgoing, talkative, sociable,
assertive
Agreeableness Trusting, good-natured,
cooperative, soft-hearted
Conscientiousness Dependable, responsible,
achievement-oriented, persistent
Emotional stability Relaxed, secure, unworried
Openness to Intellectual, imaginative, curious
Experience

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 QUESTION #1
Susan loves going to parties, where she talks to
everyone there. Susan is probably high in
A. emotional stability.
B. conscientiousness.
C. extroversion.
D. agreeableness.

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 CORE SELF-EVALUATIONS
Core self-evaluation
• Represents a broad personality trait comprising four
positive individual traits.
1. Self-efficacy
2. Self-esteem
3. Locus of control
4. Emotional stability

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 SELF-EFFICACY
Self-efficacy
• Belief in one’s ability to do a task.
Generalized self-efficacy
• Represents individuals’ perceptions of their ability to perform across
a variety of different situations.
• Career readiness competency desired by employers.
What can managers do?
• Assign jobs accordingly.
• Develop employees’ self-efficacy and generalized self-efficacy by
giving constructive pointers and positive feedback.
• Monitor employees to avoid learned helplessness by offering guided
experiences, mentoring, and role modeling.

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 SELF-ESTEEM
Self-esteem
• The extent to which people like or dislike themselves.
• High self-esteem: more apt to handle failure better, emphasize the
positive and to take more risks.
• Low self-esteem: tend to focus more on one’s weaknesses, may be
more dependent on others.
What can managers do?
• Reinforce employees’ positive attributes and skills.
• Provide positive feedback whenever possible.
• Break larger projects into smaller tasks and projects.
• Express confidence in employees’ abilities to complete their tasks.
• Provide coaching when employees are struggling to complete task.

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 LOCUS of CONTROL
Locus of control
• Indicates how much people believe they control their fate through
their own efforts.
• Internal locus of control: You believe you control your destiny.
• External locus of control: You believe external forces control you.
What can managers do?
• Employees with internal locus of control should probably be placed
in jobs requiring high initiative and lower compliance.
• Employees with external locus of control might do better in highly
structured jobs requiring greater compliance.
• Internals may prefer and respond more productively to incentives
such as merit pay or sales commissions.

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 EMOTIONAL STABILITY
Emotional stability
• The extent to which people feel secure and unworried and to which
they are likely to experience negative emotions under pressure.
• Low levels are prone to anxiety and tend to view the world
negatively.
• High levels tend to show better job performance.

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 EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (EI)
Emotional intelligence
• Ability to monitor your and others’ feelings and to use this
information to guide your thinking and actions.
• First introduced in 1909, some claim it to be the “secret elixir” to
happiness and higher performance.
Moderately associated with:
• Better social relations, well-being, and satisfaction.
• Job satisfaction.
• Better emotional control.
• Conscientiousness and self-efficacy.
• Organizational citizenship behavior.
• Self-rated performance.

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 The TRAITS of EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Table 11.2
TRAIT DESCRIPTION

1. Self-awareness. The most essential trait. This is the ability to read your own
emotions and gauge your moods accurately, so you know how
you’re affecting others.

2. Self-management. This is the ability to control your emotions and act with honesty
and integrity in reliable and adaptable ways. You can leave
occasional bad moods outside the office.

3. Social awareness. This includes empathy, allowing you to show others that you care,
and organizational intuition, so you keenly understand how your
emotions and actions affect others.

4. Relationship management. This is the ability to communicate clearly and convincingly, disarm
conflicts, and build strong personal bonds.

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 VALUES, ATTITUDES, and BEHAVIOR
Figure 11.1
Organizational behavior (OB)
• Dedicated to better understanding
and managing people at work.
• Tries to help managers explain and
predict work behavior, so they can
better lead and motivate their
employees to perform
productively.

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 VALUES and ATTITUDES
Values
• Abstract ideals that guide one’s thinking and behavior
across all situations.
Attitude
• A learned predisposition toward a given object.
• Directly influences our behavior.

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 THREE COMPONENTS of ATTITUDES
Affective: “I feel.”
• Feelings or emotions one has about a situation.
Cognitive: “I believe.”
• Beliefs and knowledge one has about a situation.
Behavioral: “I intend.”
• How one intends or expects to behave toward a
situation.

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 QUESTION #2
The statement, “I am never going to eat at this
restaurant again,” reflects the ___________
component of an attitude.
A. behavioral
B. decisional
C. cognitive
D. affective

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 COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
Cognitive dissonance
• The psychological discomfort a person experiences between his or
her cognitive attitude and incompatible behavior.
How people deal with the discomfort depends on:
• Importance: Can you live with the ambiguity?
• Control: How much control do you have over the situation?
• Rewards: What rewards are at stake with the dissonance?

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 PERCEPTIONS and INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR
Perception
• Process of interpreting and understanding one’s
environment.
Figure 11.2. The four steps in the perceptual process.

Figure 11.2

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 DISTORTIONS in PERCEPTION: STEREOTYPING
Stereotyping
• Tendency to attribute to an individual the characteristics one
believes are typical of the group to which that individual belongs.
Sex-role stereotypes
• Research revealed that men were preferred for male-dominated
jobs, women have harder time being perceived as effective leaders.
Age stereotypes
• Inaccurately believing that older workers are less motivated,
resistant to change, less trusting, and less healthy (research refuted
all of these).
Race stereotypes
• Studies demonstrated that people of color experienced more
perceived discrimination and less psychological support than whites.

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 DISTORTIONS in PERCEPTION: IMPLICIT BIAS
Implicit bias
• Attitudes or beliefs that affect our understanding, actions, and
decisions in an unconscious manner.
• “I really don’t think I’m biased, but I just have feelings about some
people.”
• Implicit bias affects employment-related decisions: a recent study
showed that both racism and ageism has impacted hiring decisions.
How to take steps forward?
• Requiring intergroup contact, positive feedback, clear norms of
behavior.

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 DISTORTIONS in PERCEPTION: HALO EFFECT
Halo effect
• Forming an impression of an individual based on a single
trait.
• “One trait tells me all I need to know.”

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 DISTORTIONS in PERCEPTION:
The RECENCY EFFECT
The recency effect
• Tendency to remember recent information better than earlier
information.
Examples:
• Employee has recently made a mistake, and it ends up being the
only topic of a performance review.
• Students’ course evaluations of professors may be affected by
course activity closer to the time of formal appraisal.
• Some stock market investors leap into holdings that are doing well
and cash out investments that are doing poorly, ignoring trends.

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 DISTORTIONS in PERCEPTION:
CAUSAL ATTRIBUTIONS
Causal attributions
• Inferring causes for observed behavior.
Fundamental attribution bias
• People attribute another person’s behavior to his or her personal
characteristics rather than to situational factors.
Self-serving bias
• People tend to take more personal responsibility for success than for
failure.

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 QUESTION #3
John is interviewing Bambi for a job opening at his
accounting firm. He notices that she has several tattoos
visible on both arms. He does not believe that people
with tattoos can be good accountants. John is engaged
in
A. counseling.
B. stereotyping.
C. behavioral interviewing.
D. situational interviewing.

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 WORK-RELATED ATTITUDES and BEHAVIORS
Employee engagement
• An individual’s involvement, satisfaction, and enthusiasm
for work.
• A “mental state in which a person performing a work
activity is full immersed in the activity, feeling full of
energy and enthusiasm for the work.”
• Employees more likely to become engaged when a
culture promotes employee development, recognition,
and trust.
• Managers can increase employee engagement with
personal resource building, job resource building,
leadership training, and health promotion interventions.

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 JOB SATISFACTION
Job satisfaction
• Extent to which you feel positively or negatively about
various aspects of your work.
• Depends on how you feel about several components,
such as work, pay, promotions, coworkers, and
supervision.
• Key correlates:
• Stronger motivation, job involvement, and life satisfaction.
• Less absenteeism, tardiness, turnover, and stress.

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 ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT
Organizational commitment
• Reflects the extent to which an employee identifies with
an organization and is committed to its goals.
• Research shows a significant positive relationship
between organizational commitment and job
satisfaction, performance, turnover, and organizational
citizenship behavior.

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 IMPORTANT WORKPLACE BEHAVIORS
• Why, as a manager, do you need to learn how to manage
individual differences? So that you can influence employees
to do their best work.
• Evaluating the performance of employees should include:
1. Performance and productivity.
2. Absenteeism and turnover.
3. Organizational citizenship behaviors.
4. Counterproductive work behaviors.

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 QUESTION #4
Herman spends his lunch hour drinking beer in his car
in the parking lot. This is an example of a(n)
_____________ behavior.
A. evaluating
B. discerning
C. counterproductive work
D. destructive work

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 The DIVERSIFIED WORKFORCE
Diversity
• Represents all the ways people are unlike and alike—the
differences and similarities in age, gender, race, religion,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, capabilities, and
socioeconomic background.

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 The DIVERSITY WHEEL

Figure 11.3
Source: From Diverse Teams
at Work by Lee Gardenswartz
and Anita Rowe. Copyright
2003, Society for Human
Resource Management,
Alexandria, VA.

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 TRENDS in WORKFORCE DIVERSITY
• Age: Millennials will replace baby boomers as the largest
adult generation in the U.S. by the time this is read.
• Gender: Many more women now work compared to 1960s
with their share of the workforce increasing to 47.2% by
2024.
• Race and ethnicity: U.S. population is becoming more racially
and ethnically diverse.
• Sexual orientation: Workplaces are becoming more inclusive.
• People with differing physical and mental abilities: about 19%
of civilian Americans have a physical or mental disability.
• Educational levels: Mismatches between education and
workforce needs.

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 BARRIERS to DIVERSITY
• Stereotypes and prejudices.
• Fear of discrimination against
majority group members.
• Resistance to diversity
program priorities.
• A negative diversity climate.
• Lack of support for family
demands.
• A hostile work environment
for diverse employees.

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 UNDERSTANDING STRESS and
INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR
Stress
• The tension people feel when they
are facing or enduring extraordinary
demands, constraints, or
opportunities and are uncertain
about their ability to handle them
effectively.

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 SOURCES of JOB-RELATED STRESS
• Individual differences: A “Type A” personality.
• Individual task demands: The job itself.
• Individual role demands: Role overload, role conflict, and
role ambiguity.
• Work-Family conflict: Created when pressure or demands
from work and family are incompatible.
• Group demands: Stress created by coworkers and
managers.
• Organizational demands: Created by environment and
organizational culture.

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 QUESTION #5
Your boss expects you to stay late to cover the
workload of a coworker who is out sick, but you are
supposed to help your mother with some work on her
house tonight. You are suffering from
A. role overload.
B. role conflict.
C. role ambiguity.
D. burnout.

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 REDUCING STRESSORS in ORGANIZATIONS
Buffers that managers can make to
reduce the stressors that lead to
burnout:
• Build resilience.
• Roll out employee assistance
programs.
• Recommend a holistic wellness
approach.
• Create a supportive environment.
• Make jobs interesting.
• Make career counseling available.

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 CAREER
CORNER MODEL of CAREER READINESS
Figure 11.4
Copyright 2088 Kinicki & Associates, Inc.

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 CAREER MANAGING YOUR CAREER
CORNER
READINESS (1 of 2)
Developing a positive approach

A positive approach represents a willingness to accept

developmental feedback, try and suggest new ideas,
and maintain a positive attitude at work.

Step 1: Identify potentially bad attitudes and consider

how your behaviors may be perceived by others.

Step 2: Identify “good attitude” behaviors and focus on

developing them at work.
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 CAREER MANAGING YOUR CAREER
CORNER
READINESS (2 of 2)
Self-managing your emotions

Self-management involves the ability to control your

emotions and act with honest and integrity in reliable
and adaptable ways.
• Identify your emotional triggers and physiological
responses.
• Engage in emotional regulation.
• Channel your emotions.

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