Individual Behavior and Learning

Individual Behavior and Learning

Individual Behavior and Learning

• Four factors that affect individual behavior in organizations:

• Drive Behavior

• Motivation
• Ability

• Provide opportunities and constraints

• Role perceptions
• Situational Contingencies

Model of Individual Behavior

Employee Motivation

• Forces within a person that drive his or her direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary behavior

• Direction - goal oriented

• Intensity - amount of effort

• Persistence - continuing effort

Ability

• Natural Aptitudes

• based on talents, size, capabilities
• cannot be learned, or acquired

• Learned Capabilities

• can be taught and learned
• physical and mental skills

• Competency vs Person Job Fit

• Generic competencies not specific task abilities

Assessing Competencies at EMC

• When EMC was about to dramatically expand its work force, an executive team at the enterprise storage products firm developed an “Employee Success Profile.” This list of generic competencies represented the traits of successful employees, such as goal-orientation and integrity.

Roles

• Role Perceptions - beliefs about what behaviors are appropriate or necessary in a particular situation, including job tasks, relative importance, and preferred behaviors to accomplish those tasks

• Role Problems

• Role Overload
• Role Conflict
• Role Ambiguity

Situational Contingencies

• Environmental Factors outside of employee control that constrain or facilitate their behavior and/or performance

• time, people, resources, working conditions, customers

Types of Work-Related Behaviors

• Joining the organization

• Remaining with the organization

• Maintaining work attendance

• Performing required job duties

• In-role performance

• Organizational citizenship behavior

• Extra-role performance

Joining Organizations

• Applying, Interviewing, Hiring, Socialization into the organization

• Often driven by external factors:

• money, prestige of organization, etc.

• Has changed with technology

Socialization into the organization

• Learning the history of the organization

• Examining and understanding the structure of the organization

• Learning the culture and atmosphere

Remaining with the Organization

• Difficult to keep employees with low unemployment rates

• Job Satisfaction

• Satisfaction does not motivate but...
• Job Dissatisfaction cause someone to leave

• Things like money become less motivating and become areas of possible dissatisfaction

Remaining cont...

• Organizational Commitment - the drive to remain with an organization

• Three aspects

• Affective - liking your organization
• Normative - feeling an obligation toward an organization
• Continuance - remaining with an organization for lack of another option

In-Role Performance

• Task performance - goal-directed activities that are under the individual’s control

• Physical and mental behaviors

• Most can be measured and controlled

• This is what we get paid for

Extra-Role Behavior

• Deviant Behavior - behaviors detrimental to the organization, the individual, and others

• Examples: ??

• Organizational Citizenship - behavior above and beyond in-role requirements that in the aggregate promote individual, organizational, and stakeholder performance

• Influenced by many factors including:

• individual beliefs, fairness perceptions, group characteristics, management behaviors

Definition of Learning

• A relatively permanent change in behavior (or behavioral tendency) that occurs as a result of a person’s interaction with the environment.

Behavior Modification

• We “operate” on the environment

• alter behavior to maximize positive and minimize adverse consequences.

• Operant versus respondent behaviors

• Law of effect

• likelihood that an operant behavior will be repeated depends on its consequences

A-B-Cs of OB Modification

Contingencies of Reinforcement

Schedules of Reinforcement

• Continuous reinforcement- after every behavior

• good for starting behaviors
• drastic fall of after some time

• Fixed

• Fixed interval- after set amount of time
• Fixed ratio- based on a set # of behaviors

• Variable

• Variable interval- average time, but no pattern
• Variable ratio- average number of behaviors, no pattern

OB Modification Limitations

• Can’t reinforce non-observable behavior

• Reinforcer tends to satiate

• Variable ratio schedule is a form of gambling

• Ethical concerns about perceived manipulation

Learning through Feedback

• Any information about consequences of our behavior

• Clarifies role perceptions

• Corrective feedback improves ability

• Positive feedback motivates future behavior

Multi-Source (360 Degree) Feedback

Giving Feedback Effectively

Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1990)

• Cognitive and environmental process combine to facilitate learning

• Behavioral modeling, Vicarious Learning

• Observing and modeling behavior of others

• Learning behavior consequences

• Observing consequences that others experience

• Self-reinforcement

• Reinforcing our own behavior with consequences within our control

• Rewards signal information about self

Learning Through Experience

• Benefits of experiential learning

• Helps acquire tacit knowledge/skills
• Allows implicit learning

• Practicing experiential learning

• Reward experimentation
• Recognize mistakes as part of learning
• Action learning -- investigating a real problem

• Success experience increase self-efficacy