Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
CHAPTER 12
Individual Behavior
There’s Beauty in Individual Differences
Chapter 12 Overview
Each Chapter contains several inset features designed to assist the student reader in applying
the concepts to relevant examples. Management Live illustrates how experiences and
activities relate to work performance. Choices provides students with an opportunity to
evaluate various sides of an issue in order to make an informed decision. Hot Topic explores
samples of debated topics in business and strategy. Facts to Consider introduces research or
trends that may be used for class discussion in the classroom or online for distance learning.
Insight profiles the importance of integrity. Quick Case presents a business related scenario
for class analysis and discussion.
Chapter 12 begins with a discussion of perception, the process through which people receive
and interpret information from the environment. A review of common perceptual distortions
include: stereotypes, halo effects, selective perception, and projections. Examples are given
of attribution errors, or the tendency to blame others when something goes wrong. A
discussion of impression management or how others perceive us is covered.
Chapter 12 Takeaways:
Takeaway 12.1 Understand how perceptions influence individual behavior.
Takeaway 12.2 Understand how personalities influence individual behavior.
Takeaway 12.3 Understand how attitudes, emotions, and moods influence individual
behavior.
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Chapter 12 Lecture Outline:
Takeaway 12.1 How Do Perceptions Influence Individual Behavior?
• Perception filters information received from our environment.
Takeaway 12.2 How Do Personalities Influence Individual Behavior?
• The Big Five personality traits describe important individual differences.
Takeaway 12.3 How Do Attitudes, Emotions, and Moods Influence Individual
Behavior?
• Attitudes predispose people to act in certain ways.
Chapter 12 Supporting Materials:
Figures
Figure 12.1 How Does Perception Influence Communication?
What’s Inside?
• Management Live: The death of work–life balance
Applications
• TestPrep 12 Multiple-Choice Questions
• Skill Building Portfolio
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Chapter Outline:
Takeaway 12.1: How do Perceptions Influence Individual Behavior?
• Perception filters information received from our environment
• Perception is the process through which people receive and interpret information
from the environment
• See Figure 12.1 for a depiction of the effects of perception on communication
How Does Perception Influence Communication?
• Perceptual distortions can obscure individual differences
Common perceptual distortions:
• Stereotypes occur when a person identifies someone with a group or category,
and then use the attributes associated with the group or category to describe the
• Perception can cause attribution errors
• Attribution is developing explanations or assigning causes for events
• Fundamental attribution error – a tendency when something goes wrong for
• Impression management influences how others perceive us
• Impression management – the systematic attempt to influence how others
perceive us
12.1 Questions for discussion with suggested answers
1) How do advertising firms use stereotypes to influence consumer behavior?
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
2) Are there times when a self-serving bias is actually helpful?
3) Does the notion of impression management contradict the idea of personal -integrity?
12.1 Career Situation: What Would You Do?
While standing in line at the office coffee machine, you overhear the person in front of you
saying this to his friend: “I’m really tired of having to deal with the old–timers here. It’s time
for them to call it quits. There’s no way they can keep up the pace and handle all the new
technology we’re getting these days.” You can listen and forget, or you can listen and act.
What would you do or say here, and why?
Takeaway 12.2: How Do Personalities influence Individual Behavior?
• Personality is the combination of characteristics that makes us unique.
• The Big Five personality traits describe work-related individual differences
DISCUSSION TOPIC
Have students describe themselves in terms of the Big Five personality traits. Also have them
describe how their personality profile (in terms of these traits) seems to influence their
behavior. You may wish to do this as an outside homework assignment.
• The Myers-Briggs Type indicator is a popular approach to personality
assessment
• Myers-Briggs type indicator – based on work of psychologist Carl Jung
• Four main dimensions of personality
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
➢ Judging/Perceiving how we react to the outside world
• Personalities vary on personal conception traits.
• Additional personality traits that can influence how people behave and work together
include:
✓ Locus of control – belief in the amount of control a person has over personal
destiny
• People with Type A personalities tend to stress themselves
• Stress is a state of tension experienced by individuals facing extraordinary
• Stress has consequences for work performance and health
• Constructive stress is a positive influence on effort, creativity and diligence in
work
• Destructive stress is dysfunctional when it is or seems to be so intense or long
12.2 Questions for discussion with suggested answers
1) Which personality trait would you add to the Big Five to make it the Big “Six”?
2) What are the advantages and disadvantages of having people of different MBTI types
working on the same team?
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
3) Can you be an effective manager and not have a Type A personality?
12.2 Career Situation: What Would You Do?
You’ve noticed that one of your co-workers is always rushing, always uptight, and constantly
criticizing herself while on the job. She never takes time for coffee when the rest of you do,
and even at lunch it’s hard to get her to stay and just talk for awhile. Your guess is that she’s
fighting stress from some source or sources other than the nature of the job itself. How can
you help her out?
Student answers will vary. Medical research also indicates that too much stress can be bad
for health. It reduces resistance to disease and increases the likelihood of hypertension,
Takeaway 12.3: How do Attitudes, Emotions, and Moods Influence
Individual Behavior?
• Attitudes predispose people to act in certain ways
✓ An attitude is a predisposition to act in a certain way toward people and
• Job satisfaction is a positive attitude toward one’s job and work experiences
• Job satisfaction is the degree to which an individual feels positive or negative
• Job satisfaction influences work behaviors
✓ Withdrawal behaviors – such as absenteeism and turnover indicate employees
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
DISCUSSION TOPIC
Ask those students who have been gainfully employed to describe what they found to be
satisfying about their jobs. Also ask them to discuss how those things affected their work
behavior.
• Emotions and moods are positive and negative states of mind that influence
behavior
12.3 Questions for discussion with suggested answers
1) Is cognitive dissonance a good or bad influence on us?
2) How can a manager deal with someone who has high job satisfaction but is a low
performer?
3) What are the lessons of mood contagion for how a new team leader should -behave?
12.3 Career Situation: What Would You Do?
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Your team leader has just told you that some of your teammates have complained to him that
you have been in a really bad mood lately and it is rubbing off on the others. They like you
and point out that this isn’t characteristic of you at all. They don’t know what to do about it.
Can they do anything to help? Is there anything your team leader might do? What is your
responsibility here, and how can you best handle the situation?
Student answers will vary. Researchers are very interested in mood contagion, the spillover
effects of one’s mood onto others. It turns out that positive emotions of people can be
Teaching Notes
In this section, ideas, exercises, and assignments are provided to assist you in integrating the
concepts in Exploring Management for your students, especially the special features of the
text.
Management Live: The Death of Work-Life Balance
The problem is: When does work end and leisure time begin? We used to “go” to work and
then come “home” where we relaxed with family and pursued personal affairs. Now we work
“on the go” anytime, from anywhere, and often at someone else’s beck and call. “Check your
Choices: Curbing bias in hiring decisions
Study. Harvard scholars Iris Bohnet, Alexandra van Geen, and Max H. Bazerman asked 100
participants to act as candidates for a new job. They performed a variety of “math and verbal
tasks” chosen by the researchers because of the common gender stereotype that “females are
believed to be worse at math tasks and better at verbal tasks than males.” Another 554 study
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
When male and female candidates were evaluated together, however, gender stereotypes
largely disappeared.
Ask Students: Does this research put its finger on a simple way to remove gender bias from
human resource decisions? Is it time to stop assessing candidates one at a time and instead
compare them to one another directly?
Ethics Check: My team leader is a workaholic
Dear Management Coach:
I’m stuck. My new team leader is an absolute workaholic. I mean he’s great in terms of
personality, support, task direction – all things a great team leader is supposed to be. But the
killer is that he just works all the time; I don’t know if he ever sleeps. Come to the office a bit
early, say 7:30am, he’s already there. Do a bit extra and leave at 6pm, he’s still hard at work.
Facts to Consider: Paying a high price for incivility at work
When rudeness rules the workplace loses in the bottom line are to be expected. Most
managers say they are against incivility and try to stop it whenever they can. But it’s also the
case that managers don’t have a good handle on the real costs incurred when employees are
rude and disrespectful toward one another. When researchers asked 800 workers from
different industries about how they responded when exposed to incivility at work, results
showed:
• 48% decreased work effort
Ask students if they have ever been on the receiving end of incivility? Is incivility taking a
toll on the teams and organizations in their lives? Is improved civility a hidden pathway to
higher performance in workplaces? How can such improvements be achieved?
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Hot Topic: Perception alert – teens do best while multitasking
“She’s multitasking again. I’ll have to get her refocused.” How often has a parent, teacher, or
supervisor said something to this effect? It’s a common belief that multitasking – called
polychronicity by psychologists – is bad, but over generalizing can be a perceptual mistake. In
Insight: There’s no substitute for integrity
When it comes to understanding people’s behavior, attitudes, and professional interactions
with others, one of the most important distinctions can be their level of ambition, which is the
desire to succeed, accomplish things, and achieve high goals. Ambition shows up in
personality as a sense of competitiveness and the urge to get better or to be the best at
something.
Get To Know Yourself Better gives the student an opportunity to review the “personal
differentiators” in the small box nearby. How do you score? Can you say that your career
Quick Case: Come on, take your vacation already
Once again Julie is leaving vacation days on the table. Out of the three weeks available to her
this year she used just six days! She’s always talking about things she’d like to do in her free
time, people she’d like to spend more time with, and places she would like to visit. But it’s all
talk. She just works. You just heard on the radio that 15% of American workers don’t take all
Discuss whether or not it is a personal choice and none of the team leader’s business if an
employee uses their vacation? Is it something to worry about in terms of stress, burnout, and
potential lost productivity? Ask students if Julie reported to them would they “turn a blind
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
eye” to this situation, or is it one that merits active intervention as team leader? Discuss what
should be done and why?
Explore Yourself: Ambition
People are different; our styles vary in the way we work, relate to others, and even in how we
view ourselves. One of the differences you might observe when interacting with other people
is in ambition, or the desire to succeed and reach for high goals. In our earlier discussion of
Sir Richard Branson, he was described as ambitious. Do your students see themselves as
Terms to Define
Agreeableness
Attitude
Attribution
Emotion
Emotional intelligence
Emotional stability
Employee engagement
Extraversion
Incivility
Job burnout
Perception
Personal wellness
Personality
Projection
Selective perception
Withdrawal behaviors
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Test Prep 12
Multiple-Choice Questions
1. Among the Big Five personality traits, __________ indicates someone who tends to be
responsible, dependable, and careful in respect to tasks.
2. A person with a/an _________ personality would most likely act unemotional and
manipulative when trying to influence others to achieve personal goals.
3. When a person tends to believe that he or she has little influence over things that happen in
life, this indicates a/an _________ personality.
4. How is a person with an authoritarian personality expected to act?
5. A new team leader who designs jobs for persons on her work team mainly “because I would
prefer to work the new way rather than the old,” is committing a perceptual error known as
_________.
(a) the halo effect
6. If a manager allows one characteristic of a person—say, a pleasant personality—to bias
performance ratings of that individual overall, the manager is falling prey to a perceptual
7. Use of special dress, manners, gestures, and vocabulary words when meeting a prospective
employer in a job interview are all examples of how people use _________ in daily life.
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Short-Response Questions
16. What is the most positive profile of Big Five personality traits in terms of positive impact on
work behavior?
All of the Big Five personality traits are relevant to the workplace. To give some basic
examples, consider the following. Extroversion suggests whether or not a person will reach
17. What is the relationship between personality and stress?
The Type A personality is characteristic of people who bring stress on themselves by virtue of
personal characteristics. These tend to be compulsive individuals who are uncomfortable
18. How does the halo effect differ from selective perception?
19. If you were going to develop a job satisfaction survey, exactly what would you try to
measure?
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Integration and Application Questions:
20. When Scott Tweedy picked up a magazine article on “How to Manage Health Care
Workers,” he was pleased to find some apparent advice. Scott was concerned about poor
performance by several of the respiratory therapists in his clinic. The author of the article
said that the “best way to improve performance is to make your workers happy.” Well, Scott
was happy upon reading this and made a pledge to himself to start doing a much better job of
“making the therapists happy in the future.”
Questions: Is Scott on the right track? Should he charge ahead as planned, or should he be
concerned about this advice? What do we know about the relationship between job
satisfaction and performance, and how can this understanding be used by Scott in this
situation?
Scott needs to be careful. Although there is modest research support for the relationship
between job satisfaction and performance, there is no guarantee that simply doing things to
Self-Assessment 12: Stress Test
Instructions
Complete the following questionnaire. Circle the number that best represents your tendency to
behave on each bipolar dimension.
Am casual about appointments1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Am never late for appointments
Am not competitive 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Am very competitive
Scoring
Total the numbers circled for all items, and multiply this by 3; enter the result here
[___________].
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Points Personality Type
120+ A+
Class Exercise 12: Job Satisfaction Preferences
Preparation
Rank the following items from 1 = least important to 9 = most important to your future job
satisfaction.
My job will be satisfying when:
2. It encourages continued development of knowledge and skills.
4. It provides a feeling of accomplishment.
6. It is intellectually stimulating.
8. It provides comfortable working conditions.
Instructions
Form into groups as designated by your instructor. Within each group, the men should develop a
consensus ranking of the items as they think women ranked them. The reasons for the rankings
Optional Instructions
Form into groups consisting entirely of men or women. Each group should meet and decide
which of the work values members of the opposite sex will rank first. Do this again for the
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Team Project 12: Difficult Personalities
Question
What personalities cause the most problems when people work together in teams, and what
can be done to best deal with them?
Instructions
1. Do a survey of friends, family, co-workers, and even the public-at-large to get answers to
these questions:
a. When you work in a team, what personalities do you have the most difficulty dealing
with?
b. How do these personalities affect you, and how do they affect the team as a whole?
d. How would you describe your personality, and are there any circumstances or situations
in which you believe others could consider your personality “difficult” to deal with?
e. Do you engage in any self-management when it comes to your personality and how it fits
when you are part of a team?
Practice Critical Thinking: Panera- A Company With Personality
Panera Bread is in the business of satisfying customers. With fresh-baked breads, gourmet soups,
and efficient service, the franchise has surpassed all expectations for success. But how did a
startup food company grow so fast and so successfully? To answer this question you have to
study its founder Ron Shaich and admire his personality.
Case discussion questions:
1. DISCUSSION
Describe how stereotypes about the fast-food industry might positively and negatively affect
Panera. Do you think of Panera as a fast-food restaurant, or has the company managed to
distinguish itself from this industry segment?
Panera has certainly distinguished itself from the fast-food segment of the restaurant industry,
and I don’t believe Panera is perceived as a fast-food restaurant. Panera can be thought of as
Schermerhorn & Bachrach Exploring Management 6th edition Instructor’s Manual
Suggested Team Exercise for Chapter 12
Break the class into teams and have the teams discuss various techniques or methods that
individuals in the team have found to be successful in dealing with stress. Each team should
develop a list of “tactics to deal with stress” based on their team discussions. After the teams
have had sufficient time to develop their lists, have each team report and share their ideas with
the rest of the class.
Additional team exercise:
Break the class into teams and ask the teams to consider each of the flowing communication
scenarios and to discuss and summarize their answers to each scenario:
1. You are the CEO of a company and, because of very poor sales due to the recent
recession, have determined that you need to terminate 10% of your workforce as a cost
control measure. How would you communicate this message to all employees in a large
company with multiple locations?