Behavior Modification and Self

Management
 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
Role
Perceptions

Motivation
Individual
Behavior and
Performance
Ability

Situational
Contingencies
 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 can motivate
– 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
• This is what we get paid for
 Extra-Role Behavior
• 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.
 A-B-Cs of OB Modification

Antecedents Behaviour Consequences

What Happens before What Person Says or does What happens after behaviour
behaviour

Examples

Warning light flashes Operator switches off the Co-workers thank operator for
on operator's console machine's power source stopping the machine

New attendance bonus system Employee attends work at Employee receives attendance
is announced scheduled times bonus
THE REINFORCEMENT THEORY

B.F. Skinner (1938)- Father of Behaviorism

The theory suggests that that behavior is a function of its

consequences.
The behavior that results into pleasant consequences is
more likely to be repeated and a behavior that results into
unpleasant consequences is less likely to be repeated
TYPES OF REINFORCEMENTS
REINFORCEMENT

POSITIVE NEGATIVE
REINFORCEMEN REINFORCEMEN PUNISHMENT EXTINCTION
T T
 Contingencies of reinforcement:
There are four contingencies of reinforcement:
• Positive reinforcement: behavioural
consequences due to positive reinforcement
such as pay increase, promotion, leave with
pay and so on. With the positive
reinforcement, individuals are attracted to
repeat behaviour in an organisational setting.
• Negative reinforcement: It occurs with the
removal or avoidance of a consequence.
Managers practice negative reinforcement
when they stop criticising employees whose
poor performance has improved, and
consequently employees repeat that behaviour
which improved their performance.
• Employees come to work on time to avoid
supervisory reprimands
• Punishment: This is the situation of applying
an unpleasant consequence or removing
pleasant consequences to an undesired
behaviour. For example, suspending an
employee who comes late or drunk at work to
stop his or her unpleasant behaviour.
• Extinction: This occurs in the situation of
specific behaviour not reinforced by
management in time. If the supervisor never
responds to complaints made by an employee,
he or she stops complaining.
 Cognitive theory
• Individuals’ knowledge about themselves and
the world around them is called cognitive
systems. These systems are developed
through cognitive processes--perceiving,
imaging, thinking, reasoning and decision-
making. Literally, cognition implies a conscious
or deliberate process of acquiring knowledge.
• In organisations, training programmes are
designed and implemented to strengthen relations
between cognitive cues (instructions, supervisions,
explicit job procedures, etc.) in order to achieve
individuals’ expectations (intrinsic and extrinsic
rewards). Moreover, the cognitive theory is widely
popular in organisational behaviour to motivate at
work with the establishment of relations between
cognition and organisational behaviour.
 Social Learning Theory
(Bandura, 1990)
• This theory explains the effects of the combinations
of cognitive, behavioural and environmental forces
on learning. The theory states that people learn by
watching others and develop pictures of their
behaviours and the results. When people watch
others’ behaviour, they eventually attempt to model
the same behaviour, and if the result of the
modelling is positive, they will repeat the same
behaviour; if not, they will stop it.
• Learning behavioural consequences: This is the
approach to learning by observing consequences of
our or others’ behaviours. In this learning feature, we
apply our logical thinking to understand
consequences of our own or others’ actions. In
organisational settings, we learn by experiencing the
consequences of others’ wrong-doings in the form of
warnings they received, and with these warnings, we
learned to reduce our wrong behaviours.
• Self-reinforcement: Another form of social
learning theory is the learning by self-
reinforcement. With this approach of learning,
people learn without any external environmental
pressure. An individual sets the targets and
voluntarily completes it with self-reinforcement.
For example, deciding to take a coffee break only
after completing home tasks. This is a kind of
self-reinforcement that leads to learning.
• Learning through feedback: People also learn
through social and non-social sources of
feedback. Social sources of feedback are, for
example, supervisor, customers, co-workers
and subordinates. This feedback helps to
correct employees’ unwanted behaviours.
Multi-Source (360 Degree) Feedback

Supervisor
Project
Customer
leader

Co-worker
Evaluated Co-worker
Employee

Subordinate Subordinate
Subordinate
Giving Feedback Effectively

Specific

Relevant Effective Frequent

Feedback

Credible Timely
• On the other hand, non-social feedback comes
from sources other than social. For example,
feedback on trends of sales in the last five
years, business positions of the competitors
and employee attendance records in the last
six months come directly from the job itself or
from computer printouts.
 Learning Through Experience
• Benefits of experiential learning
– Helps acquire tacit knowledge/skills
• Practicing experiential learning
– Reward experimentation
– Recognize mistakes as part of learning
– Action learning -- investigating a real problem
• Success experience increase self-efficacy