Individual Behavior and Learning

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Individual Behaviorand Learning
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C H A P T E R
T W O
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Individual Behavior and Learning

• Four factors that affect individual behavior in
  organizations
• Drive Behavior
• Motivation
• Ability
• Provide opportunities and constraints
• Role perceptions
• Situational Contingencies

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Model of Individual Behavior
Individual Behavior and Performance
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Employee Motivation

• Forces within a person that drive his or her
  direction, intensity, and persistence of
  voluntary behavior
• Direction - goal oriented
• Intensity - amount of effort
• Persistence - continuing effort

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Ability

• Natural Aptitudes
• based on talents, size, capabilities
• cannot be learned, or acquired
• Learned Capabilities
• can be taught and learned
• physical and mental skills
• Competency vs Person Job Fit
• Generic competencies not specific task abilities

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Assessing Competencies at EMC

• When EMC was about to dramatically expand its
  work force, an executive team at the enterprise
  storage products firm developed an Employee
  Success Profile. This list of generic
  competencies represented the traits of successful
  employees, such as goal-orientation and
  integrity.

Courtesy of EMC Corp.
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Roles

• Role Perceptions - beliefs about what behaviors
  are appropriate or necessary in a particular
  situation, including job tasks, relative
  importance, and preferred behaviors to accomplish
  those tasks
• Role Problems
• Role Overload
• Role Conflict
• Role Ambiguity

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Situational Contingencies

• Environmental Factors outside of employee control
  that constrain or facilitate their behavior
  and/or performance
• time, people, resources, working conditions,
  customers

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Types of Work-Related Behaviors

• Joining the organization
• Remaining with the organization
• Maintaining work attendance
• Performing required job duties
• In-role performance
• Organizational citizenship behavior
• Extra-role performance

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Joining Organizations

• Applying, Interviewing, Hiring, Socialization
  into the organization
• Often driven by external factors
• money, prestige of organization, etc.
• Has changed with technology

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Socialization into the organization

• Learning the history of the organization
• Examining and understanding the structure of the
  organization
• Learning the culture and atmosphere

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Remaining with the Organization

• Difficult to keep employees with low unemployment
  rates
• Job Satisfaction
• Satisfaction does not motivate but...
• Job Dissatisfaction cause someone to leave
• Things like money become less motivating and
  become areas of possible dissatisfaction

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Remaining cont...

• Organizational Commitment - the drive to remain
  with an organization
• Three aspects
• Affective - liking your organization
• Normative - feeling an obligation toward an
  organization
• Continuance - remaining with an organization for
  lack of another option

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In-Role Performance

• Task performance - goal-directed activities that
  are under the individuals control
• Physical and mental behaviors
• Most can be measured and controlled
• This is what we get paid for

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Extra-Role Behavior

• Deviant Behavior - behaviors detrimental to the
  organization, the individual, and others
• Examples ??
• Organizational Citizenship - behavior above and
  beyond in-role requirements that in the aggregate
  promote individual, organizational, and
  stakeholder performance
• Influenced by many factors including
• individual beliefs, fairness perceptions, group
  characteristics, management behaviors

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Definition of Learning

• A relatively permanent change in behavior (or
  behavioral tendency) that occurs as a result of a
  persons interaction with the environment.

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Behavior Modification

• We operate on the environment
• alter behavior to maximize positive and minimize
  adverse consequences.
• Operant versus respondent behaviors
• Law of effect
• likelihood that an operant behavior will be
  repeated depends on its consequences

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A-B-Cs of OB Modification
Example
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Contingencies of Reinforcement
Consequence is Introduced
Consequence is Removed
No Consequence
Behavior Increases/ Maintained
Positive reinforcement
Negative reinforcement
Punishment
Extinction
Punishment
Behavior Decreases
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Schedules of Reinforcement

• Continuous reinforcement- after every behavior
• good for starting behaviors
• drastic fall of after some time
• Fixed
• Fixed interval- after set amount of time
• Fixed ratio- based on a set of behaviors
• Variable
• Variable interval- average time, but no pattern
• Variable ratio- average number of behaviors, no
  pattern

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OB Modification Limitations

• Cant reinforce non-observable behavior
• Reinforcer tends to satiate
• Variable ratio schedule is a form of gambling
• Ethical concerns about perceived manipulation

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Learning through Feedback

• Any information about consequences of our
  behavior
• Clarifies role perceptions
• Corrective feedback improves ability
• Positive feedback motivates future behavior

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Multi-Source (360 Degree) Feedback
Evaluated Employee
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Giving Feedback Effectively
Specific
Effective Feedback
Frequent
Relevant
Timely
Credible
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Social Learning Theory(Bandura, 1990)

• Cognitive and environmental process combine to
  facilitate learning
• Behavioral modeling, Vicarious Learning
• Observing and modeling behavior of others
• Learning behavior consequences
• Observing consequences that others experience
• Self-reinforcement
• Reinforcing our own behavior with consequences
  within our control
• Rewards signal information about self

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Learning Through Experience

• Benefits of experiential learning
• Helps acquire tacit knowledge/skills
• Allows implicit learning
• Practicing experiential learning
• Reward experimentation
• Recognize mistakes as part of learning
• Action learning -- investigating a real problem
• Success experience increase self-efficacy