ESSENTIALS OF

ORGANIZATIONAL
BEHAVIOUR (OB).
Week 3 & 4
Department of CS-INU Peshawar.
Prepared by:
Arsalan Ahmed Khan.
Essentials of Organizational Behavior, 9/e
Stephen P. Robbins/Timothy A. Judge

Chapter 2
Foundations of
Individual Behavior

2-2
 After studying this chapter, you
should be able to:

1. Explain the relationship between ability and job

performance.
2. Contrast the three components of an attitude.
3. Discuss similarities and differences between job
satisfaction and the other job attitudes discussed.
4. Discuss the causes and consequences of job
satisfaction.
5. Understand how to shape the behavior of others.
6. Distinguish among the four schedules of
reinforcement.

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 Ability

• Refers to an individual’s capacity to perform the

various tasks in a job
• Is a current assessment of what one can do
• Intellectual ability is one of the best predictors of
performance
• The correlation between intelligence and job
satisfaction is about zero
• Employee performance is enhanced when there
is a high ability-job fit

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 Attitudes

• Evaluative statements – either favorable or

unfavorable – concerning objects, people
or events
• Attitudes reflect how one feels
about something

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 Major Components of Attitude

• Cognition – an opinion or belief

• Affect – the emotional or feeling segment
• Behavior – the intention to behave in a
certain way

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 Consistency of Attitudes

• People seek consistency among their

attitudes and between their attitudes and
their behavior
• When there is an inconsistency, the
individual may alter either the attitudes or
behavior, or develop a rationalization for
the discrepancy

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 Cognitive Dissonance

• Any inconsistency between two or more attitudes,

or between behavior and attitudes
• Individuals seek to minimize dissonance
• The desire to reduce dissonance is determined
by:
 The importance of the elements creating the
dissonance
 The degree of influence the individual believes he or
she has over the elements
 The rewards that may be involved in dissonance

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 Moderators of the attitudes-
behavior relationship

• Importance of the attitude

• Specificity of the attitude or behavior
• Accessibility of the attitude
• The existence of social
pressures
• A person’s direct experience
with the attitude

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 Self-Perception Theory

• The view that behavior influences attitudes

• Argues that attitudes are used after the fact to
make sense out of an action that has already
occurred rather than as devices that precede and
guide action
• Tend to infer attitude from behavior when you
have had few experiences regarding an issue
• Attitudes likely to guide behavior when your
attitudes have been established for a while

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 Major Job Attitudes

• Job satisfaction
• Job involvement
• Psychological empowerment
• Organizational commitment
 Affective commitment
 Continuance commitment
 Normative commitment
• Perceived organizational support
• Employee engagement

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 What causes job satisfaction?

• Work itself – the strongest correlation with

overall satisfaction
• Pay – not correlated after individual
reaches a level of comfortable living
• Advancement opportunities
• Supervision
• Coworkers
• A person’s personality
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 Effects of Satisfied and
Dissatisfied Employees

• Job performance – strong correlation

• OCB – modest relationship but more related to
conceptions of fair outcomes, treatment and
procedures
• Customer Satisfaction – strong correlation
• Absenteeism – moderate to weak negative
correlation
• Turnover – moderate negative correlation
• Workplace deviance – strong correlation

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 Learning

Any relatively permanent

change in behavior that occurs
as a result of experience.

• Learning involves change

• The change must become ingrained
• Some form of experience is necessary for
learning
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 Theories of Learning

• Operant Conditioning
 Argues that people learn to behave to get
something they want or avoid something they
don’t want
• Social Learning
 Individuals can learn by observing what
happens to other people and just being told
about something, as well as by direct
experiences

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 Methods of Shaping Behavior

1. Positive reinforcement
2. Negative reinforcement
3. Punishment
4. Extinction

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 Schedules of reinforcement

• Continuous – reinforces behavior each and

every time it is demonstrated
• Intermittent
 Fixed or variable ratio
 Fixed or variable interval

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Schedules of Reinforcement

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 Implications for Managers

• Ability
 Effective selection process improves fit
 Promotion and transfer based on abilities
 Fine-tune job to better match abilities
• Attitudes – raise satisfaction by focusing on
making work challenging and interesting
• Learning – Use reinforcement instead of
punishment

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 Summary

1. Explained the relationship between ability and job

performance.
2. Contrasted the three components of an attitude.
3. Discussed similarities and differences between job
satisfaction and the other job attitudes.
4. Discussed the causes and consequences of job
satisfaction.
5. Understand how to shape the behavior of others.
6. Distinguished among the four schedules of
reinforcement.

2-20