CHAPTER 14
UNDERSTANDING INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Are You Self-Confident?
I. Understanding Yourself and Others
A. The Value and Difficulty of Knowing Yourself
B. Enhance Your Self-Awareness
II. Attitudes
A. High-Performance Work Attitudes
B. Conflicts among Attitudes
III. Perception
ANNOTATED LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, students should be able to:
1. Explain why understanding yourself is essential for being a good manager, and describe two methods for
enhancing self-awareness.
The first requirement for being a good manager is understanding oneself. Managers’ characteristics and
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2. Define attitudes and discuss the importance of work-related attitudes.
An attitude is an evaluation —either positive or negative— that predisposes a person to act in a certain way.
Understanding attitudes is important to managers because attitudes determine how people perceive the work
3. Describe the perception process and explain perceptual distortions.
Perception is the cognitive process people use to make sense out of the environment by selecting, organizing,
and interpreting information from the environment. Attitudes affect perceptions and vice versa. Because of
4. Define major personality traits and describe how personality can influence workplace attitudes and
behaviors.
In common usage, people think of personality in terms of traits, or relatively stable characteristics of a person.
Extroversion is the degree to which a person is sociable, talkative, assertive, and comfortable with interpersonal
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5. Identify positive and negative emotions and describe how emotions affect behavior.
Positive emotions are triggered when people are on track toward achieving their goals. Examples include
happiness/joy, pride, love/affection, and relief. Negative emotions are triggered when people become frustrated
6. Define the four components of emotional intelligence and explain why they are important for today’s
managers.
The four components of emotional intelligence include:
• Self-awareness. The basis for all the other components. Being aware of what you are feeling.
7. Outline a step-by-step system for managing yourself and your time.
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1. Empty your head. Collect all the things you need or want to do.
8. Explain the difference between challenge stress and threat stress.
Challenge stress fires you up, whereas threat stress burns you out. Stress up to a certain point challenges you
9. Identify ways individuals and organizations can manage stress to improve employee health, satisfaction,
and productivity.
Stress is an individual’s physiological and emotional response to stimuli that place physical or psychological
demands on the individual and create uncertainty and lack of personal control when important outcomes are at
stake.
LECTURE OUTLINE
ARE YOU SELF-CONFIDENT?
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Self-confidence is the foundation for many important behaviors of a new manager. It refers to general
I. UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF AND OTHERS
A. The Value and Difficulty of Knowing Yourself
Self-awareness means being aware of the internal aspects of one’s nature, such as personality traits, beliefs,
B. Enhance Your Self-Awareness Exhibit 14.1
1. Seeking feedback to enhance self-awareness can improve performance and job satisfaction for both
II. ATTITUDES
An attitude is a positive or negative evaluation that predisposes a person to act in a certain way. An employee
with an attitude problem might be hard to get along with, might gripe, and consistently resist new ideas.
Discussion Question #3: In what ways might attitudes influence the behavior of employees who are faced with
learning an entirely new set of computer-related skills in order to retain their jobs at a manufacturing facility?
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A. A. High-Performance Work Attitudes
1. Job Satisfaction Exhibit 14.2
a. Job satisfaction is a positive attitude to one’s job. People experience this attitude when their
work matches their needs and interests and they like their co-workers. Job satisfaction also
2. Organizational Commitment
a. Organizational commitment is loyalty to and engagement in one’s organization. An employee
with a high degree of organizational commitment is likely to say we when talking about the
company. Such a person likes being a part of the organization and tries to contribute to its
success.
b. Managers can foster organizational citizenship—work behavior that goes beyond job
B. Conflicts Among Attitudes
1. Sometimes a person may discover that his or her attitudes conflict with one another or are not
reflected in behavior. This can create a state of cognitive dissonance, a psychological discomfort
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Discussion Question #5: How might a manager apply an understanding of perception to communicate more
effectively with subordinates?
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III. PERCEPTION Exhibit 14.3, Exhibit 14.4, Exhibit 14.5
Perception is the cognitive process people use to make sense out of the environment by selecting, organizing,
and interpreting information from the environment. Because of individual differences in attitudes, personality,
Perceptual distortions are errors in perceptual judgment that arise from inaccuracies in any part of the
perceptual process. Some types of errors are so common that managers should become familiar with them.
1. Stereotyping is the tendency to assign an individual to a group or broad category and then attribute
A. Attributions
a. Attributions are judgments about what caused a person’s behavior—something about the person
or something about the situation. An internal attribution says characteristics of the person led to
IV. PERSONALITY AND BEHAVIOR
An individual’s personality is the set of characteristics that underlie a relatively stable pattern of behavior in
response to ideas, objects, or people in the environment. Personality tests can be useful for predicting job–
related behavior and organizational fit in hiring and promotion decisions. The use of personality tests has
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A. Personality Traits Exhibit 14.6
1. There are five general dimensions that describe personality, often called the Big Five personality
factors.
a. Extroversion refers to the degree to which a person is sociable, talkative, assertive, and
comfortable with interpersonal relationships.
2. These factors represent a continuum. A person may have a low, moderate, or high degree of each
quality. Having a moderate-to-high degree of each personality factor is considered desirable for a
wide range of employees, but is not a guarantee for success.
3. A link has been found between how guilty people feel when they make serious mistakes and how
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B. Attitudes and Behaviors Influenced by Personality Exhibit 14.7
1. Locus of control refers to whether individuals place the primary responsibility for success or failure
within themselves (internally) or on outside forces (externally).
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Discussion Question #8: How might understanding whether an employee has an internal or an external locus
of control help a manager better communicate with, motivate, and lead the employee?
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2. Authoritarianism is the belief that power and status differences should exist within the
organization. If a manager and his or her employees differ in their degree of authoritarianism, the
3. Machiavellianism is the tendency to direct much of one’s behavior toward the acquisition of power
and the manipulation of others for personal gain. Research shows that high Machs are predisposed
4. Problem-Solving Styles and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Exhibit 14.8
a. Individuals differ in the way they go about gathering and evaluating information for problem solving
and decision making. Psychologist Carl Jung believed that people gather information either by
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c. According to Jung, only one of the four functions—sensation, intuition, thinking, or feeling—is
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V. EMOTIONS
A. Positive and Negative Emotions Exhibit 14.9
1. An emotion can be thought of as a mental state that arises spontaneously within a person based on
interaction with the environment rather than through a conscious effort and is often accompanied by
physiological changes or sensations.
2. Managers can influence whether people experience primarily positive or negative emotions at work.
typically linked to higher productivity and greater effectiveness of employees.
B. Emotional Intelligence
1. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) includes five basic components.
a. Self-awareness means being aware of what you are feeling. It is the basis for all the other
components.
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d. Relationship awareness is the ability to connect to others, build positive relationships, respond to
the emotions of others, and influence others.
NEW MANAGER SELF-TEST: EXPRESSED EMOTIONS
Understanding yourself and others is a major part of a new manager’s job. The important thing as a manager is
Discussion Question #7: Which of the four components of emotional intelligence do you consider most
important to an effective manager in today’s world? Why?
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VI. MANAGING YOURSELF
Self-management is the ability to engage in self-regulating thoughts and behavior to accomplish all your tasks
and handle difficult or challenging situations. Yet all of us have patterns of habit and behavior that make it hard
to manage ourselves toward more efficient behavior.
A. Basic Principles for Self-Management
Three basic principles that define how to manage your big and small commitments effectively so that you
can get them accomplished are: