Values, Attitudes, and Motivation in Organizational Behavior
Values
Values are abstract ideas that guide one’s thinking and behavior across all situations. They are strongly influenced by our everyday situations, beliefs, and events occurring in the societies we live in.
Schwartz’s Model of Values
Schwartz believed that values are “broad goals to accomplish over time.” Values are also relatively stable and can influence behavior outside of our awareness. The Schwartz theory consists of two bipolar dimensions:
First Bipolar Dimension
- Self-Enhancement: Pursuit of one’s own interest and relative success and dominance over others.
- Self-Transcendence: Concern for the welfare and interest of others.
Second Bipolar Dimension
- Openness to Change: Independence of thought, action, and feelings and readiness for change.
- Conservation: Order, self-restriction, preservation of the past, and resistance to change.
Attitudes
Attitudes represent our feelings or opinions about people, places, and objects and range from positive to negative.
Characteristics of Attitudes
- Affective Component: Also known as the “I feel” component, it contains the feelings or emotions we have about people or a situation.
- Cognitive Component: The “I believe” component reflects the beliefs or ideas one has about an object or situation.
- Behavioral Component: The “I intend” component refers to how we intend to react to certain situations.
Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction is an affective or emotional response toward various facets of one’s job. There are five predominant models:
- Need Fulfillment: Understand and meet employee’s needs.
- Met Expectations: Meet expectations of employees about what they will receive from the job.
- Value Attainment: Structure the job and its rewards to match employee values.
- Equity: Monitor employee’s perceptions of fairness and interact with them so they feel fairly treated.
- Dispositional/Genetic Components: Hire employees with an appropriate disposition.
Organizational Citizen Behavior (OCB)
Organizational Citizen Behavior (OCB) is defined as individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system.
Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB)
Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB) represents behavior that harms other employees, the organization as a whole, or organizational stakeholders such as customers and shareholders.
Big Five Personality Dimensions
These are five basic dimensions that simplify more complex models of personality:
- Extraversion: Outgoing, talkative, sociable, assertive.
- Agreeableness: Trusting, good-natured, cooperative, soft-hearted.
- Conscientiousness: Dependable, responsible, achievement-oriented, persistent.
- Emotional Stability: Relaxed, secure, unworried.
- Openness to Experience: Intellectual, imaginative, curious, and broad-minded.
Proactive Personality
Someone who is relatively unconstrained by situational forces and who affects environmental change. Proactive people identify opportunities and act on them, show initiative, take action, and persevere until meaningful change occurs.
Social Information Processing Theory
Perception is a cognitive process that enables us to interpret and understand our surroundings. It consists of four stages: Stage 1: Selective attention/comprehension, interpret, and categorize all the information → Stage 2: Encoding and simplification → Stage 3: Storage and retention → Stage 4: Retrieval and response.
Stereotype
A stereotype is an individual’s set of beliefs about the characteristics or attributes of a group.
Four Layers of Diversity
- Personality: Is at the center of the diversity wheel because it represents a stable set of characteristics responsible for a person’s identity.
- Internal Influences (Surface-level characteristics): Are those that are quickly apparent to interactants, such as race, age, and gender.
- External Influences: They represent individual differences that we have a greater ability to influence or control. Examples include income, personal habits, religion, and work experience.
- Organizational Dimensions (Deep-level characteristics): Are those that take time to emerge in interactions, such as attitudes, opinions, and values.
Extrinsic Motivation
Extrinsic motivation results from the potential or actual receipt of extrinsic rewards. E.g., Incentive pay.
Intrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation occurs when an individual is “turned on to one’s work because of the positive internal feelings that are generated by doing well.” E.g., satisfaction or self-praise for being efficient at the workplace.
Content Theories
McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y
- Theory X: Is a pessimistic view of employees that they dislike work, must be monitored, and can only be motivated with rewards and punishments.
- Theory Y: Is a modern and positive set of assumptions about people at work; that they are self-engaged, committed, responsible, and creative.
Need Hierarchy Theory
Motivation is a function of five basic needs: self-actualization, esteem, love, safety, and physiological.
Acquired Needs Theory
States that three needs – achievement, affiliation, and power – are the key drivers of employee behavior.
Self-Determination Theory
Assumes that three innate needs influence our behavior and well-being – competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
Motivator-Hygiene Theory
Proposes that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction arise from two different sets of factors – satisfaction comes from motivating factors, and dissatisfaction comes from hygiene factors.
Process Theories
Equity Theory
Equity theory is a model of motivation that explains how people strive for fairness and justice in social exchanges and given-and-take relationships. People are motivated to maintain consistency between their beliefs and their behavior.
Expectancy Theory
Expectancy theory holds that people are motivated to behave in ways that produce desired combinations of expected outcomes. For instance, it can be used to predict whether to quit or stay at a job; whether to exert substantial or minimal effort at a task.