CHAPTER 2: INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOUR, PERSONALITY, AND VALUES

2-1 MARS MODEL OF INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOUR:

 Motivation: represents the forces within a person that affect his or her direction, intensity,
and persistence of voluntary behavior
1. Direction: refers to the path along which people steer their effort.
2. Intensity: is the amount of effort allocated to the goal. Intensity is all about how
much people push themselves to complete a task.
3. Persistence: which refers to the length of time that the individual continues to exert
effort toward an objective.

* These 3 elements of motivations are cognitive (thoughts) and emotional conditions

that directly cause us to move
 Ability: includes both the natural aptitudes and the learned capabilities required to
successfully complete a task
 Learned capabilities: are the physical and mental skills and knowledge you have
acquired
 Competencies: characteristics of a person that result in superior performance.
Aptitudes and learned capabilities (skills and knowledge) are the main elements.

Person–job matching strategies:

1. select applicants who already demonstrate the required competencies
2. train employees who lack specific knowledge or skills needed for the job
3. redesign the job so that employees get tasks within their current abilities

 Role Perceptions: the degree to which a person understands the job duties assigned to or
expected of him or her.
Role clarity exits in 3 forms:
 1. employees have clear role perceptions when they understand the specific duties or
consequences for which they are accountable.
2. employees understand the priority of their various tasks and performance
expectations
3. understanding the preferred behaviors or procedures for accomplishing tasks

Benefits of Clear Role Perceptions:

1. Employees know where to direct their effort.

2. Employees with role clarity perform work more accurately and efficiently
3. Essential for coordination with coworkers and other stakeholders
4. Motivates employees because they have a higher belief that their effort will produce
the expected outcomes

 Situational Factors: Individual behavior and performance also depend on the situation,
which is any context beyond the employee’s immediate control.
Two main influences on individual behavior and performance:
1. work context constrains or facilitates behavior and performance.
2. situations provide cues that guide and motivate people.

2-2 FIVE TYPES OF INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE WORKPLACE:

 Task performance: refers to

the individual’s voluntary goal-directed
behaviors that contribute to organizational objectives.
3 types of task performances:
1. Proficient task performance: refers to performing the work efficiently and
accurately
2. Adaptive task performance: refers to how well employees modify their thoughts
and behavior to align with and support a new or changing environment (how
well employees respond to the changes in the workplace environment)
 3. Proactive task performance: refers to how well employees take the initiative to
anticipate and introduce new work patterns that benefit the organization

 Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs): refers to various forms of cooperation and

helpfulness to others that support the organization’s social and psychological context
Benefits of OCBs
1. Employees who help others have higher task performance because they receive
more support from coworkers.
2. OCBs also increase team performance where members depend on one another.

Drawbacks of OCBs

1. OCBs take time and energy away from performing tasks, so employees who give
more attention to OCBs risk lower career success in companies that reward task
performance.
2. Higher work–family conflict because of the amount of time required for these
activities.

 Counterproductive Work Behaviors (CWBs): refers to voluntary behaviors that have the
potential to directly or indirectly harm the organization. Involves intentional and non-
intentional behaviours.
 Joining and staying with the organization
 Maintaining work attendance
Contrast: Absenteeism-Drawbacks:
-staff shortages and the temporarily loss of the absent employee’s skills and knowledge
-increased workloads or overtime among coworkers
-lower performance by temporary staff filling the vacant position
-poorer coordination in the work process
-poorer customer service
-more workplace accidents
-coworkers feeling conflict and injustice by an absent employee’s frequent absences
Benefits:
-when employees engage in presenteeism—showing up for work in difficult conditions.
These employees tend to be less productive and may reduce the productivity of
coworkers + may worsen their own health and increase health and safety risks of
coworkers.
 2-3 PERSONALITY IN ORGANISATIONS
 Personality: the relatively enduring pattern of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors
that characterize a person, along with the psychological processes behind those
characteristics

 The actions of an individual, under close inspection, reveal distinct patterns

called personality traits
 Traits: are broad concepts that allow us to label and understand individual
differences
 An individual’s personality traits measured in childhood predict many behaviors
and outcomes in adulthood

Five-Factor Model of Personality Dimensions

Openness to experience and social vitality increase through to young adulthood

Agreeableness and Conscientiousness tend to increase through to late life

Personality becomes more stable by adulthood because we form a clearer and more rigid self-
concept.

This increasing clarity anchors our behavior with the help of our executive function (part of the
brain that monitors and regulates goal-directed behavior to keep it consistent with our self-
concept)
Five-Factor Model and Work Performance:

Criticisms: 71

 performance is better predicted by the specific traits than by the broad Big Five
dimensions
 relationship between a personality dimension or trait and performance may be

nonlinear.
 Jungian Personality Theory and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): is an instrument designed to measure the elements of

Jungian personality theory, particularly preferences regarding perceiving and judging
information

Sensing involves
perceiving information directly through the five senses; relies on an organized structure to
acquire factual and preferably quantitative details. Intuition relies more on insight and
subjective experience to see relationships among variables.

MBTI Drawbacks:

1. Poor predictor of job performance + is generally not recommended for employment

selection or promotion decisions
2. Measurement issues.
3. MBTI can potentially identify employees who prefer face-to-face versus virtual
teamwork, but does not seem to predict how well a team develops.
4. Questionable value in predicting leadership effectiveness.

MBTI Benefits:
1. Most widely studied measure of cognitive style in management research + is most
popular personality test for career counseling and executive coaching.
2. Takes a neutral or balanced approach by recognizing both the strengths and limitations
of each personality type in different situations. In contrast, the five-factor model views
people with higher scores as better than those with lower scores on each dimension.
 This may be a restrictive view of personality and makes the Big Five model more difficult
to apply in coaching and development setting

2-4 VALUES IN THE WORKPLACE

Values: are stable, evaluative beliefs that guide our preferences for outcomes or courses of
action in a variety of situations

Value System: when values are arranged into a hierarchy of preferences

Each person’s unique value system is developed and reinforced through socialization

Personal Values: values exist only within individuals,

Shared Values: groups of people might hold the same or similar values, these are ascribed to
team, department, organization, profession, or entire society.

Organizational Values: values shared by people throughout an organization

Cultural Values: values shared across a society

Difference between values and personality traits:

1. Values are evaluative—they tell us what we ought to do—whereas personality traits

describe what we naturally tend to do.
2. Personality traits have minimal conflict with each other (e.g., you can have high
agreeableness and high introversion), whereas some values are opposed to other
values.
3. Both are partly determined by heredity; values are influenced more by socialization
compared to an individual’s personality traits

Schwartz’s Values Circumplex

These 10 broad values categories are further clustered into four quadrants.

1. Openness to change, refers to the extent to which a person is motivated to pursue

innovative ways
a. self-direction (creativity, independent thought),
b. stimulation (excitement and challenge),
c. hedonism (pursuit of pleasure, enjoyment, gratification of desires).

2. Conservation (opposite of 1), which is the extent to which a person is motivated to

preserve the status quo.
a. conformity (adherence to social norms and expectations),
b. security (safety and stability),
c. tradition (moderation and preservation of the status quo).

3. Self-enhancement, refers to how much a person is motivated by self-interest.

a. achievement (pursuit of personal success),
b. power (dominance over others),
c. hedonism (a values category shared with openness to change)

4. Self-transcendence (opposite of 3), which refers to motivation to promote the welfare

of others and nature
a. benevolence (concern for others in one’s life)
b. universalism (concern for the welfare of all people and nature)

Values and Individual Behavior

Personal values influence decisions and behavior in various ways:

1. Values directly motivate our actions by shaping the relative attractiveness (valence) of
the choices available. In other words, we experience more positive feelings toward
alternatives that are aligned with our most important values
2. Values indirectly motivate behavior by framing our perceptions of reality.
3. We are motivated to act consistently with our self-concept and public self-presentation.

Factors that weaken the relationship between personal values and decisions/behavior:

1. “Disconnect” between personal values and individual behavior is the situation. The
MARS model states that the situation influences behavior, which sometimes causes
people to act contrary to their personal values.
2. We don’t actively think about values much of the time, we need to be reminded of our
values
Values congruence: refers to how similar a person’s values hierarchy is to the values hierarchy
of another entity.

Benefits of Value Congruence:

1. Employee’s values congruence with team members increases the team’s cohesion and
performance.
2. Congruence with the organization’s values tends to increase the employee’s job
satisfaction, loyalty, and organizational citizenship as well as lower stress and turnover.
3. Employees are also more likely to make decisions that are compatible with
organizational expectations.

Drawbacks of Value Congruence:

1. Too much congruence can create a “corporate cult” that potentially undermines
creativity, organizational flexibility, and business ethics.
2. Missing out on better decisions because employees with diverse values offer
different perspectives, which potentially lead to better decision making, won’t offer
their ideas.

2-5 ETHICAL VALUES AND BEHAVIOR

Ethics: refers to the study of moral principles or values that determine whether actions are
right or wrong and outcomes are good or bad.

Three Ethical Principles:

1. Utilitarianism: this principle says the only moral obligation is to seek the greatest good
for the greatest number of people
Problems:
a. Requires a cost–benefit analysis, yet many outcomes aren’t measurable.
b. Justify actions that other principles would consider immoral because those means
produce the greatest good overall

2. Individual rights: this principle says that everyone has the same set of natural rights,
such as freedom of movement, physical security, freedom of speech, and fair trial. The
individual-rights principle extends beyond legal rights to human rights that everyone is
granted as a moral norm of society.
Problems:
a. Some individual rights may conflict with others.
 3. Distributive justice: this principle says that the benefits and burdens of similar
individuals should be the same; otherwise, they should be proportional.
Problems:
a. Difficult to agree on who is “similar” and what factors are “relevant.”

Moral Intensity, Moral Sensitivity, And Situational Influences

1. Moral intensity: the degree to which an issue demands the application of ethical principles.

Decisions with high moral intensity have strong ethical implications that usually affect many
people

The moral intensity of a situation is higher when:

1. The decision will have substantially good or bad consequences.

2. Most people view the decision outcomes as good or bad (versus diverse public opinion
whether those outcomes are considered good or bad).
3. There is a high probability (rather than low probability) that the good or bad decision
consequences will occur.
4. Many people will be affected by the decision and its consequences.

2. Moral sensitivity (also called ethical sensitivity): a characteristic of the person, namely his
or her ability to detect a moral dilemma and estimate its relative importance.

This awareness includes both cognitive (logical thinking) and emotional level awareness that
something is or could become morally wrong. People with high moral sensitivity can more
quickly and accurately estimate the moral intensity of the issue. Not always ethical, but always
realize what is unethical.

Factors associated with a person’s moral sensitivity:

1. Expertise or knowledge of prescriptive norms and rules.

2. Previous experience with specific moral dilemmas.
3. Employees who are better at empathizing are more sensitive to the needs and situation
of others, which makes them more aware of ethical dilemmas involving others.
4. Some people have higher moral sensitivity than others is how they define and view
themselves. Employees who strongly define themselves by their moral character (called
their moral identity) are more sensitive to moral dilemmas because they put more
energy into maintaining ethical conduct.
5. Mindfulness increases moral sensitivity because it involves actively monitoring the
environment as well as being sensitive to our responses to that environment.
-This vigilance requires effort as well as skill to receptively evaluate our thoughts
and emotions. Unfortunately, we have a natural tendency to minimize effort,
which leads to less mindfulness.
3. Situational Factors Along with moral intensity and moral sensitivity, ethical conduct is
influenced by the situation in which the conduct occurs.

Strategies to support ethical behaviour:

1. Introduce the code of ethical conduct

2. Train and regularly evaluate employees about their knowledge of proper ethical conduct
3. Ethics audits
4. Introduce a set of shared values that reinforces ethical conduct
5. Conduct and vigilance of corporate leaders

2-6 VALUES ACROSS CULTURES

Five Cross-Cultural Values:

Individualism: is the extent to which we value independence and personal uniqueness. Highly
individualist people value personal freedom, self-sufficiency, control over their own lives, and
appreciation of the unique qualities that distinguish them from others.

Collectivism: is the extent to which we value our duty to groups to which we belong and to
group harmony. Highly collectivist people define themselves by their group memberships,
emphasize their personal connection to others in their in-groups, and value the goals and well-
being of people within those groups.

Power distance: refers to the extent to which people accept unequal distribution of power in a
society. Those with high power distance value unequal power.

Uncertainty avoidance: is the degree to which people tolerate ambiguity (low uncertainty
avoidance) or feel threatened by ambiguity and uncertainty (high uncertainty avoidance).
 i. Employees with high uncertainty avoidance value structured situations in which
rules of conduct and decision making are clearly documented.
ii. They usually prefer direct rather than indirect or ambiguous communications

Achievement-nurturing orientation: reflects a competitive versus cooperative view of relations

with other people.

i. People with a high achievement orientation value assertiveness, competitiveness, and

materialism.
ii. They appreciate people who are tough, and they favor the acquisition of money and
material goods.
 In contrast, people in nurturing-oriented cultures emphasize relationships and
the well-being of others. They focus on human interaction and caring rather than
competition and personal success

Caveats about Cross-Cultural Knowledge

1. Too many studies have relied on small, convenient samples (such as students
attending one university) to represent an entire culture
2. Cross-cultural studies often assume that each country has one culture
3. Cross-cultural research and writing continue to rely on a major study conducted
almost four decades ago of 116,000 IBM employees across dozens of countries. Its
findings are becoming out-of-date