CHAPTER 2: FOUNDATIONS OF INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR

The individual in the organization was always an essential influence to the success of a firm; so that, three foundations of individual behavior in this chapter need to be examined carefully for the most crucial understanding. They are: ability, attitudes, and learning. Specifically, a deeply discussion in these foundations is needed to know how intellectual ability contributes to job performance, how employees attitudes about their jobs aff ect the workplace, how people learn behaviors, and what management can do to shape those behaviors. Initially, it is vital to talk about ability of individual in organization. It refers to an individuals capacity (ex: knowledge, skill, talent) to perfor m the various tasks in a job and is a current assessment of what one can do. One of person abilities is intellectual ability, which encompasses mental activities such as thinking, reasoning, and problem solving. This is one of the best predictors of performance across all sorts of jobs. Another is ability and job fit. Employee performance is enhanced when an employee and position are well matched, what people also call a high ability-job fit. The second foundation of individual behavior is attitudes, which are evaluative statements concerning objects, people, or events. Attitudes reflect how one feels about something and are considered as fundamental properties. To fully understand attitudes, four major questions about attitudes need to be examined: 1.What are the main components of attitudes? 2. How consistent are attitudes? 3. Does behavior always follow from attitudes? 4. What are the major job attitudes? 1. Typically, researchers have assumed that attitudes have three components: cognition, affect, and behavior. When a statement that Supervisor is unfair was evaluated, the cognitive component of an attitude formed. And it sets the stage for the more critical part of an attitude: its affective component. Affect is the emotional or feeling segment of attitude and is reflected in the statement. Finally, affects can lead to behavioral outcomes- behavioral component , which refers to an intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something. Viewing attitudes as made up of three component- cognition, affect, and behavior- is helpful in understanding their complexity and the potential relationship between attitudes and behavior. 2. Research has generally concluded that people seek consistency among their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance explains the linkage between attitudes and behavior and refers to any inconsistency that an individual might perceive between two or more attitudes, or between behavior and attitudes. Three attributes that reduce dissonance are: the importance of the elements creating the dissonance, the degree of influence, the rewards. 3. No, it does not. A review of research in the late 60s challenged the interpretation of the relationship between the attitudes and behavior, concluding that attitudes were unrelated to behavior or, at best, only slightly related. But modern research has demonstrated that attitudes

significantly predict future behavior and believe that the relationship can be enhanced by taking moderating variables into account: importance, its specificity, its accessibility, social pressure, persons direct experience. Moreover, self-perception theory, therefore, argued that attitudes are used, affect the fact, to make sense out of an action that has already occurred rather than as devices that precede and guide action. 4. Three attitudes have been concerned: job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment. And two other attitudes that attracted attention from researchers: perceived organizational support (POS) and employee engagement. The term job satisfaction can be defined as a positive feeling about ones job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. A person with a high level of job satisfaction holds positive feelings about the job, while a person who is dissatisfied holds negative feelings about the job. There are many factors can influence job satisfaction such as pay, promotion, supervision, coworkersand job satisfaction is also affected by an individuals personality. The specific outcomes of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction in the workplace were evaluated by these factors: job performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), customer satisfaction, absenteeism, turn over and workplace deviance. The most important action managers can take to raise employee satisfaction is to focus on the intrinsic parts of the job, such as making the work challenging and interesting. Last but not least, to explain and predict behavior of an individual, managers need to understand how people learn. In general way, learning is any relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience. Two popular theories are used to explain the process acquiring patterns of behavior: operant conditioning and social learning. By using operant conditioning, people learn to behave to get something they want and to avoid something they dont want. By using social learning, individuals can also learn by observing what happens to other people and just by being told about something, as well as by direct experiences. Some methods can be used to shape ones behavior such as met hods of shaping behavior. This method strengthens a response and increases the probability of repetition, moves the individual closer to the desired behavior. Other is schedules of reinforcement including continuous and intermittent reinforcement. Although punishment eliminates undesired behavior more quickly than negative reinforcement does, punished behavior tends to be only temporarily suppressed rather than permanently changed and may produce unpleasant side effects. Therefore, managers are advised to use reinforcement rather than punishment. To sum up, this chapter looked at three major influenced on individual behaviors in organizations: ability, attitudes, and learning. Understanding these foundations of individual behaviors can help managers evaluating the employees abilities, how they behave in work place so that managers would use the right reinforcements to get desired behaviors, improve a firm outcomes.