Foundations Of Individual Behavior Analysis

CHAPTER 2: FOUNDATIONS OF INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR

In this chapter, we learn about three important basic foundations that affect individual behavior in organizations - ability, attitudes and learning. The knowledge of those three foundations will give people a brief, general view about how people behave in organizations and what managers should do to improve workers' performance.

The first concept is ability. It can be explained as an individual's capacity to do many different tasks in a job. The accurate knowledge of how people differ in abilities helps managers to increase the effectiveness of organizations by assigning suitable tasks for each individual worker. The most important aspect is intellectual ability. It refers to mental activities,

It has three components: cognition, affect and behavior. Cognition component refers to the thoughts and beliefs one has about a certain object. Affect component refers to emotional reactions individual has towards a certain object. Behavior component refers to the way one would behave towards a certain object. Those three components have a close relationship and affect employee’s behavior in organizations. It is showed that people want to have consistency between their attitudes and their actions. They might find ways to persuade themselves that their actions are right if it appears an inconsistency. This leads to the cognitive dissonance theory proposed in the late 1950s by Leon Festinger. The theory emphasizes on explaining why and how the attitudes and behavior are usually linked together. Based on Festinger's ideas, late researches indicate that moderating variables - such as the importance, specificity and accessibility of the attitude, social pressure, a person's direct experience with the attitude - can strengthen the relationship between attitudes and behavior. At the workplace, attitudes are divided into three main types: job satisfaction, job involvement and organizational commitment. Job satisfaction is the most important factor that influences the employee’s performance. Managers can examine deeper in job

In the simplest way, learning is defined as any relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience. Two most important theories of learning is operant conditioning and social learning. The operant conditioning theory states that people learn to behave so that they can achieve the things they want and avoid the things they do not want, so if they can get satisfactory reward for a specific behavior, they are likely to repeat that behavior more frequently. Seen as an extension of operant conditioning, social learning is about individual learn to behave from observations of how people around them behave or from direct experiences. Managers can find many methods to teach the employees how to behave and shape their behaviors in the organization. The timing of reinforcement is important in shaping behavior. Managers may choose the continuous reinforcement schedule - a method that strengthens the wish to perform a behavior every time it demonstrated - or the intermittent reinforcement schedule - a method that makes a behavior worth repeating by giving enough reinforcement. The former schedule is appropriate for unstable and low-frequency responses while the latter one is suitable for stable and high-frequency