Study Guide - Chapters 1-3

Study Guide Chapters 1-3
BUAD250
20 questions true/false, 40 questions multiple choice, 4 of 6 short
answer
Short answer topics are bolded
Chapter 1
Definition of organization
Organizations are groups of people who work interdependently toward
some purpose.
Organizational effectiveness
- represented by several perspectives,
- the organizations fit with the external environment,
- internal subsystems configuration
- emphasis on organizational learning,
- Ability to satisfy the needs of key stakeholders.
Knowledge management
AKA organizational learning perspective
- holds that organizational effectiveness depends on the organizations capacity to
acquire, share, use, and store valuable knowledge.
Unlearning
Unlearning removes knowledge that no longer adds value and, in fact,
may undermine the organization's effectiveness. Some forms of
unlearning involve replacing dysfunctional policies, procedures, and
routines. Other forms of unlearning erase attitudes, beliefs, and
assumptions. For instance, employees rethink the best way to
perform a task and how to serve clients. Organizational unlearning is
particularly important for organizational change.
Globalization
Economic, social, and cultural connectivity with people in other parts of
the world.
Open systems perspective
A perspective which holds that
- organizations depend on the external environment for resources,
- affect that environment through their output,
- consist of internal subsystems that transform inputs into outputs.
HPWP perspective
A perspective which holds that effective organizations incorporate

several workplace practices that leverage the potential of human
capital.
Knowledge sharing
This aspect of organizational learning involves distributing knowledge
to others across the organization. Knowledge sharing is often equated
with computer intranets and digital repositories of knowledge. These
systems are relevant, but knowledge sharing mainly occurs through
structured and informal communication as well as various forms of
learning (such as observation, experience, training, and practice).
Stakeholders
Individuals, organizations, and other entities who affect, or are affected
by, the organization's objectives and actions.
Corporate social responsibility
Organizational activities intended to benefit society and the
environment beyond the firm's immediate financial interests or legal
obligations.
Employment relationship trends
Ratio of outputs to inputs
Chapter 2
Elements of motivation
The forces within a person that affect his or her direction, intensity,
and persistence of voluntary behaviour.
MARS model
Motivation
Ability
Role Perceptions
Situational factors
Organizational citizenship
Various forms of cooperation and helpfulness to others that support the
organization's social and psychological context.
Personality
The relatively enduring pattern of thoughts, emotions, and behaviours
that characterize a person, along with the psychological processes
behind those characteristics.
Conscientiousness
A personality dimension describing
dependable, and self-disciplined.
people
who
are
careful,
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

An instrument designed to measure the elements of Jungian
personality theory, particularly preferences regarding perceiving and
judging information
Impact of teleworking
Teleworking reduces the time and stress of commuting to work and
makes it easier to fulfill family obligations, such as temporarily leaving
the home office to pick the kids up from school. Consequently,
teleworkers tend to experience better work-life balance.108 However,
teleworking may increase stress for those who crave social interaction
and who lack the space and privacy necessary to work at home.
Conceptual anchors
The multidisciplinary anchor
The systematic research anchor
The contingency anchor
The multiple levels of analysis anchor
Ability
The natural aptitudes and learned capabilities required to successfully
complete a task.
Work-related behaviours
Absenteeism
Presenteeism
Counterproductive work behaviours
Voluntary behaviours that have the potential to directly or indirectly
harm the organization.
Big five personality dimensions
The five abstract dimensions representing most personality traits:
conscientiousness,
agreeableness,
neuroticism,
openness
to
experience, and extroversion. A personality dimension describing
people with high levels of anxiety, hostility, depression, and selfconsciousness.
Schwartzs values model

Openness to change motivation to pursue innovative ways
Conservation -- motivation to preserve the status quo
Self-enhancement -- motivated by self-interest
Self-transcendence -- motivation to promote welfare of others
and nature
Espoused vs. enacted values
Espoused values are usually socially desirable, so they present a
positive public image. Even if top management acts consistently with
the espoused values, lower-level employees might not do so.
Employees bring diverse personal values to the organization and, as
we discuss later in this chapter, some of these personal values conflict
with the organization's espoused values.
Organizational culture is not represented by espoused values. Instead,
it consists of shared enacted valuesthe values that most leaders and
employees truly rely on to guide their decisions and behaviour. These
values-in-use are apparent by watching executives and other
employees in action, including their decisions, where they focus their
attention and resources, and how they behave toward stakeholders.
Cross-cultural values
Individualism
Collectivism
Power distance
Uncertainty avoidance
Achievement orientation
Surface- and deep-level workforce diversity
Flexibility of personality
Chapter 3
Self-concept
An individual's self-beliefs and self-evaluations.
Self-verification
A person's inherent motivation to confirm and maintain his/her existing
self-concept.
Social identity theory
A theory that explains that people define themselves by the groups to
which they belong or have an emotional attachment.
Systemic discrimination
Unintentional (systemic) discrimination, whereby decision makers rely
on stereotypes to establish notions of the ideal person in specific
roles. A person who doesnt fit the ideal tends to receive a less
favourable evaluation.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
The perceptual process in which our expectations about another
person cause that person to act in a way that is consistent with those
expectations.
Contact hypothesis
A theory stating that the more we interact with someone, the less
prejudiced or perceptually biased we will be against that person.
Self-concept complexity and clarity
- Self-concepts have varying degrees of complexity, that is, the number of distinct
and important roles or identities that people perceive about themselves. Everyone
has some degree of complexity because they see themselves in more than one role
(student, friend, daughter, sports enthusiast, etc).
- Clarity, the third characteristic of self-concept, is the degree to which you have a
clear, confidently defined, and stable self-concept. Clarity occurs when we are
confident about who we are, can describe our important identities to others, and
provide the same description of ourselves across time. Self-concept clarity
increases with age as well as with the consistency of the person's multiple selves.
Locus of control
A person's general belief about the amount of control he or she has
over personal life events.
Selective attention
The process of attending to some information received by our senses
and ignoring other information.
Mental models
Visual or relational images in our mind that represent the external
world.
Attribution rules
- Consistency
- Distinctiveness
- Consensus
Attribution errors
- Fundamental attribution error
- self-serving bias
- self-fulfilling prophecy
Diversity awareness training

Diversity awareness training tries to minimize discrimination by
making people aware of systemic discrimination as well as prejudices
that occur through stereotyping. This training also attempts to dispel
myths about people from various cultural and demographic groups.
Awareness of perceptual biases can reduce these biases to some
extent by making people more mindful of their thoughts and actions.
However, awareness training has only a limited effect. One problem is
that teaching people to reject incorrect stereotypes has the unintended
effect of reinforcing rather than reducing reliance on those stereotypes.
Another problem is that diversity training is ineffective for people with
deeply held prejudices against those groups.
Developing a global mindset
Developing a global mindset involves improving ones perceptions, so
the practices described earlier on self-awareness and meaningful
interaction are relevant.
Increasing empathy
Empathizing with others improves our sensitivity to the external causes
of another persons performance and behaviour, thereby reducing
fundamental attribution error. A supervisor who imagines what its like
to be a single mother, for example, would become more sensitive to
the external causes of lateness and other events among such
employees.
Short answer topics

Chapter 1:
Knowledge acquisition
The anchors
Organizational memory
Organizational memory (OM) (sometimes called institutional or
corporate memory) is the accumulated body of data, information, and
knowledge created in the course of an individual organizations
existence. Falling under the wider disciplinary umbrella of knowledge
management, it has two repositories: an organization's archives,
including its electronic data bases; and individuals memories.
Kenneth Megill says corporate memory is information of value for reuse. He views corporate memory from the perspective of information
services such as libraries, records management and archival
management.
Organizational memory can only be applied if it can be accessed. To
make use of it, organizations must have effective retrieval systems for
their archives and good memory recall among the individuals that
make up the organization. Its importance to an organization depends
upon how well individuals can apply it, a discipline known as
experiential learning or evidence-based practice. In the case of
individuals memories, organizational memorys veracity is invariably
compromised by the inherent limitations of human memory.
Individuals reluctance to admit to mistakes and difficulties compounds
the problem. The actively encouraged flexible labor market has
imposed an Alzheimer's-like corporate amnesia on organizations that
creates an inability to benefit from hindsight.
Chapter 2:
Person-job matching
With any of these interpretations, the challenge is to match a person's
competencies with the job's task requirements. A good personjob
match not only produces higher performance; it also tends to increase
the employee's well-being.
1- select applicants who already demonstrate the required competencies. For
example, companies ask applicants to perform work samples, provide references
for checking their past performance, and complete various selection tests.
2- A second strategy is to provide training, which has a strong influence on
individual performance and organizational effectiveness.
3- The third personjob matching strategy is to redesign the job so that employees
are given tasks only within their current learned capabilities. For example, a
complex task might be simplifiedsome aspects of the work are transferred to
othersso that a new employee performs only tasks that he or she is currently
able to perform. As the employee becomes more competent at these tasks, other
tasks are added back into the job.
Power distance
Chapter 3:
Stereotyping
A. One reason why people engage in stereotyping is that, as a form of categorical
thinking, it is a natural and mostly nonconscious energy-saving process that
simplifies our understanding of the world.
B. A second reason is that we have an innate need to understand and anticipate how
others will behave. We dont have much information when first meeting someone,
so we rely heavily on stereotypes to fill in the missing pieces.
C. Stereotyping in Organizational Settings 1. Stereotyping is an extension of social
identity. 2. It is the process of assigning traits to people based upon their membership
in a social category. a. Scholars say that stereotypes generally have some
inaccuracies, some overestimation or underestimation of real differences, and some
degree of accuracy. b. One problem with stereotyping is that stereotyped traits do not
accurately describe every person in that social category. c. People also develop
inaccurate stereotypes under certain conditions, such as the degree to which they
interact with people in that group. d. Another problem is that we develop inaccurate
stereotypes of groups to enhance our own social identity. 3. Ethical problems with
stereotypes. a. The greatest concern is that stereotyping lays the foundation for
prejudice - unfounded negative emotions toward people belonging to a particular
stereotyped group. b. Stereotyping could also be partly responsible for sexual
harassment - the unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature that detrimentally affects the
work environment or leads to adverse job-related consequences for victims.
Fundamental attribution error

Fundamental attribution error refers to our tendency to perceive
another person's actions caused mainly by internal attributions,
whereas we recognize both internal and external causes of our own
actions.57 We tend to identify a co-worker's motivation as the main
reason why he or she is late for work (e.g., doesnt like the job),
whereas we attribute our own lateness partly or mostly to external
factors such as traffic jams, failed alarm clocks, or unexpected
emergencies (e.g., getting the kids ready for school). Fundamental
attribution error occurs because observers cant easily see the external
factors that constrain the person's behaviour. We didnt see the traffic
jam that caused the person to be late, for instance. Research suggests
that fundamental attribution error is more common in Western
countries than in Asian cultures, where people are taught from an early
age to pay attention to the context in interpersonal relations and to
see everything as being connected in a holistic way.58

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Study Guide Chapters 1-3

A perspective which holds that effective organizations incorporate

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Schwartzs values model

Diversity awareness training

Short answer topics

Fundamental attribution error

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