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College aantekeningen Behavior and Communication in Organizations
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Lecture notes for the course Behavior and Communication in Organizations (BCO) at the VU.
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Behaviour and Communication in Organisations (BCO)Lecture 1:
Organisational behaviour: an interdisciplinary field dedicated to better understanding and
managing people at work.
Diversity is good: it proposes that diverse workgroups perform better because of more
informational diversity:
- Do better when it comes to problem solving.
● They use diverse backgrounds to generate a more comprehensive view of a
problem.
- Different perspectives can help groups to brainstorm or uncover more alternatives
during problem solving activities.
- Diversity can enlarge the number of contacts in a group - people are learning from
each other due diverse perspectives.
Diversity is bad: it proposes that similarities and differences are used as a basis for
categorising self and others into groups, causing negative consequences for group work.
- Creates “us (ingroup)” vs “them (outgroup)” mentality.
● Liking ingroup members, disliking outgroup members.
● Favouritism/bias, discrimination.
● Conflicts between ingroup and outgroup members.
Organisational culture: a set of shared, taken-for-granted implicit assumptions that a group
holds and determines how it perceives, thinks about and reacts to its various environments.
,→ Passed onto new employees through the process of socialisation & influences people’s
behaviour at work.
Represented on different levels:
- Observable artefacts: the physical manifestation of an organisation’s culture (eg.
manner of dress, awards, stories, the way people talk, etc.)
- Espoused values: explicitly states values and norms that are preferred by an
organisation (eg. wanting to be the best, being open about things, etc)
Societal culture: a set of beliefs and values about what is desirable and undesirable in a
community of people, and a set of formal or informal practices to support the values.
Expatriates: people living and/or working outside their home country.
Lecture 2:
Self-esteem: belief about one’s own self worth based on overall self-evaluation (eg. social,
performance, appearance, etc.)
- How can you enhance your self-esteem? → The Social Comparison Theory:
● Downwards social-comparisons: comparing yourself with someone who is
less attractive, successful, etc. than you, making yourself feel better.
● Upwards social-comparisons: comparing yourself with someone who is more
attractive, successful, etc. than you, making yourself feel worse. However, it
can also help as motivation to become like them.
Self-monitoring: the extent to which a person observes his or her own self-expressive
behaviour and adapts it to the demands of the situation.
- High self-monitoring individuals (“chameleons”) have more career success but do not
necessarily perform better in their job.
→ Some extremely low self-monitoring individuals show high performance (eg.
people with autism)
Self-efficacy: a person’s belief about his chances of successfully accomplishing a specific
task.
- Sources of self-efficacy beliefs:
● Prior experience: feedback on task performance.
, ● Behaviour models: observing others performing tasks and copying that
behaviour, thinking you can do the same.
● Persuasion from others: encouragement and fulfilling expectations others
have of you:
→ Pygmalion effect: someone’s high expectations for another person result in
high self-efficacy for that person.
→ Golem effect: someone’s low expectations for another person result in low
self-efficacy and performance for that person.
● Assessment of physical/emotional state: illness, depression (lower
self-efficacy/esteem).
● Self-fulfilling prophecies often operate at an unconscious level.
- Consequences of self-efficacy beliefs
● Higher job performance, you’ll have more confidence so you’ll try harder.
Social identification: the part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his
knowledge of his membership of a social group together with the value and emotional
significance attached to that membership → Social Identity Theory.
- Cognitive element: people are aware of their group membership.
- Evaluative element: people attach value to their group membership.
- Affective element: group membership has emotional significance.
Example: I am an Ajax supporter and I’m aware of this (cognitive). Ajax has a high status, so
supporting them is alright (evaluative). I feel emotionally connected to the club and share this
feeling with several other supporters (affective).
How to deal with low group status?
- Outgroup favouritism: acknowledging inferior status → doesn’t help.
- Individual mobility: weaken the ties with one’s group or try to become a member of a
group with a higher status.
- Social competition: improve the status of one’s group.
- Social creativity: choose other groups to compare with, change the values assigned
to the attributes of the group.
Organisational identification:
- That part of our self-concept that is based on our membership of a specific
organisation.
● Thereby integrating beliefs about that organisation into one’s social identity.
- Identification is stronger with organisations that have high perceived external
prestige.
- It is strongly related to organisational commitment.
Organisational commitment:
- Affective commitment (desire):
● Employee’s emotional attachment to, identification with and involvement in
the organisation (people feel that they want to be a part of an organisation)
- Normative commitment (obligation):
● Reflects a feeling of obligation to continue employment (people feel that they
ought to be a part of the organisation)
- Continuance commitment (costs/benefits):
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