9.2 Individual Behaviors
Learning Objectives
- Identify the individual perceptions and personality traits that affect employees and managers.
Psychology plays a big role when considering employee and manager behavior. Let’s look at some concepts for discussing employee behavior.
Perceptions play a big role in human behavior.
- Selective perception is a bias in perceiving. We focus on only a few elements in our environment. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Often it is necessary for us to “tune out” distractions. This becomes a problem for a manager, however, when the manager only looks at certain attributes of an employee and tunes out other, perhaps more impactful, attributes.
- Stereotyping is labeling people based upon one attribute. That attribute could be race or gender. A person may be of German descent and someone may attribute stereotypic qualities of a German. The stereotyping can be either positive or negative.
- Attribution is where someone attributes causes to behavior. For example, a person may leave work early and another person say that they are lazy when, in fact, they have a medical emergency.
- Halo Effect is the concept that we view one trait as characterizing the whole individual.
And there a many personality traits.
- Locus of control is the degree one believes that their behavior has effect on what happens to them.
- Self-efficacy is the belief about one’s capabilities to do the work
- Machiavellianism is ruthless and cunning behavior. One often associates this characteristic with game playing . It is behavior aimed at gaining power and control.
- Self-esteem is the extent to which one believes one is worthwhile.
- Risk propensity is the willingness to take risks.
