Summary Organisational Behaviour & Human Resource Management

Human Resource Management:

HRM & OB deals with the human factor in organizations

Organizational Behavior = Interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding people at work
(Psychology, Sociology, and management)

Human Resource Management = The policies, practices and systems that influence
employees’ attitudes, behaviors and performance

Organizational Behavior levels:
1. Individual level (What drives people, what motivates them, how do their
personalities influence)
2. Group level (Group dynamics, relatsionships)
3. Organization level (Organizational culture)

These levels facilitate HRM to come up with organizational outcomes

Lecture 1: Attitudes

Attitudes are an important predictor of behavior
 Generating positive attitudes increases desired behaviors such as performance,
health and OCB
 Generating positive attitudes decreases undesired behaviors such as absenteeism
and turnover

Attitudes are evaluative statements or judgments concerning objects, people, events or
ideas
(Attitudes are learned predispositions to respond in a consistently favorable or unfavorable
manner with respect to an attitude object) official term explanation

,Theory of Planned Behavior (Implementation intentions form Gollwitzer)




Cognitive dissonance: unbalance between cognition, affect, and behavior (intended
behavior and actual behavior)
Cognitive Dissonance theory (Festinger): We try to find replacements for our attitudes that
conform more with our behavior




Most prominent attitudes in organizations:
1. (Job) satisfaction
+ Performance
 Absenteeism, deviance
2. Involvement
+ Performance
 Absenteeism, Turnover
3. Commitment
+ Performance
 Absenteeism, Turnover
4. Perceived Organizational Support (POS)
+ Well-Being, Organizational Identification
 Involvement

,Lecture 2: Personality & Diversity

Personality: Combination of enduring physical, behavioral and mental characteristics that
makes individuals unique

Key aspects of personality:
 Relatively stable
o Temporal stability
o Cultural stability
 Psychological dispositions towards certain behaviors
 Highly visible in weak (vs. strong) situations
 Determined by genetics and environment (=Interactionists perspective)

Personality as a relatively stable individual difference that predicts work related outcomes




The Big 5 Theory (on personality):




Proactive personality is:
 A stable disposition to take personal initiative (e.g., voice opinions, craft your job) in
a broad range of activities and situations
 Related to Conscientiousness; Extraversion
 Related to Internal Focus of Control
 Highly valued in today’s work and career
 Generalizable to different cultures

, Dark Triad:
 Narcissism
 Machiavellianism
 Psychopathy

Common Characteristics
 Aggressiveness
 High extraversion and openness (fearless)
 Low conscientiousness and agreeableness
 Low emotional empathy
 Self-promotion (not humble)
 Higher probability for anti-social behavior


What is Diversity? (Gardenswartz & Rowe)




Closer to the center > Harder to change


Surface Level Diversity:
 Differences in easily perceived characteristics
 E.g., gender, ethnicity, age
 Does not necessarily represent the way people think or feel
 Stereotypes

Deep Level Diversity
 Differences in harder to see characteristics
 E.g., values, beliefs, and work preferences
 Becomes progressively more important as people get to know each other


Affirmative action: intervention aimed at giving management a chance to correct past
imbalance, injustice or discrimination