Organisational Behaviour I: Concept, Scope and the Nature of Human Behaviour, Personality, Perception, Learning, Attitude and Motivation

Organisational behaviour is the systematic study of the actions and attitudes that people exhibit within organisations, and the application of that knowledge to improve effectiveness. It works at three levels of analysis: the individual (personality, perception, learning, attitudes, motivation), the group (norms, roles, cohesion, leadership, communication, conflict) and the organisation system (structure, culture, change and development). It draws on psychology (individual behaviour, learning, personality, motivation), sociology (groups, roles, status, bureaucracy), social psychology (attitudes, group decision-making, change), anthropology (culture, values) and political science (power, conflict, politics). Fred Luthans's S–O–B–C model describes behaviour as the result of a stimulus acting on the organism (the person, with his cognitions and personality), producing behaviour that has consequences, which in turn shape future behaviour.

The nature of human behaviour is summed up in a few propositions that OB takes as its starting point: behaviour is caused (it has reasons, even when the person cannot state them); it is goal-directed; it is motivated by needs; individuals differ (the law of individual differences), so that the same stimulus draws different responses; people act as whole persons, bringing home, caste, community and health to the workplace; and behaviour can be learned and changed. Kurt Lewin summarised it in the formula B = f(P, E): behaviour is a function of the person and the environment.

Personality is the relatively stable set of characteristics that influence how a person thinks, feels and behaves across situations. Its determinants are heredity, environment (culture, family, social groups) and situation. The main theories are type theories (Hippocrates's four temperaments; Kretschmer's and Sheldon's body types; Carl Jung's introvert and extravert, the basis of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with its four dichotomies and sixteen types), trait theories (Gordon Allport; Raymond Cattell's sixteen source traits; the Big Five), psychoanalytic theory (Freud's id, ego and superego), and the self-theory of Carl Rogers. The Big Five, the best supported, are Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (emotional stability): OCEAN. Conscientiousness predicts job performance most consistently across occupations.

• Locus of control (Julian Rotter, 1966): internals believe they control what happens to them; externals attribute it to luck, fate or others.
• Type A and Type B behaviour (Friedman and Rosenman, 1959): Type A is competitive, impatient, hostile and time-pressured, and was linked to coronary heart disease; Type B is relaxed and easy-going.
• Machiavellianism (pragmatism and emotional distance), self-esteem, self-monitoring and risk-taking are further traits studied in OB.
• Chris Argyris's immaturity–maturity continuum argued that formal organisations keep adults in an infant-like state of passivity and dependence, producing frustration and withdrawal.

Perception is the process by which people select, organise and interpret sensory information to give meaning to their environment; what people act on is their perception of reality, not reality itself. Perception is shaped by the perceiver (attitudes, motives, interests, experience, expectations), the target (novelty, motion, size, background) and the situation (time, setting). Attribution theory (Harold Kelley) explains how we judge whether another person's behaviour is internally caused (by disposition) or externally caused (by circumstances), using three cues: distinctiveness (does the person behave this way only in this situation?), consensus (do others behave the same way?) and consistency (does the person behave this way over time?). The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overrate internal causes when judging others; the self-serving bias is the tendency to credit our successes to ourselves and our failures to circumstances. Common shortcuts that distort judgement are selective perception, the halo effect, contrast effects, projection (attributing one's own characteristics to others) and stereotyping.

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience. Classical conditioning (Ivan Pavlov) pairs a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned one until the neutral stimulus alone draws the response. Operant conditioning (B. F. Skinner) holds that behaviour is a function of its consequences: positive reinforcement (adding something pleasant) and negative reinforcement (removing something unpleasant) both strengthen behaviour, while punishment (adding something unpleasant) and extinction (withholding reinforcement) weaken it. Negative reinforcement is not punishment. Schedules of reinforcement are continuous or intermittent, and intermittent schedules are fixed-interval (a monthly wage), variable-interval (surprise inspections), fixed-ratio (piece rates) and variable-ratio (sales commissions on uncertain deals); variable-ratio schedules produce the highest and most persistent response. Albert Bandura's social learning (later social cognitive) theory adds learning by observing models, through attention, retention, motor reproduction and reinforcement, and the concept of self-efficacy. Organisational behaviour modification (OB Mod, Luthans and Kreitner) applies reinforcement to work behaviour through identifying, measuring, analysing (antecedent–behaviour–consequence), intervening and evaluating.

An attitude is an evaluative statement, favourable or unfavourable, about objects, people or events. It has three components: cognitive (belief: "my supervisor gives work unfairly"), affective (feeling: "I dislike my supervisor") and behavioural (intention to act: "I will ask for a transfer"). Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance (1957) holds that people feel discomfort when their attitudes and behaviour are inconsistent and reduce it by changing one of them, adding a new cognition, or trivialising the conflict; the pressure to reduce dissonance depends on the importance of the elements, the degree of influence the person believes he has, and the rewards involved. The work attitudes studied most are job satisfaction, job involvement, organisational commitment (John Meyer and Natalie Allen's three components: affective, continuance and normative, 1991), perceived organisational support and employee engagement. Dissatisfaction can be expressed, in the exit–voice–loyalty–neglect framework, through leaving, speaking up (including through a union), waiting patiently, or letting performance slide.

Motivation is the set of processes that account for an individual's intensity, direction and persistence of effort towards a goal. Content theories ask what motivates. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs (1943) runs from physiological needs through safety, social (belongingness), esteem and self-actualisation; a satisfied need ceases to motivate, and needs are pursued roughly in order. Clayton Alderfer's ERG theory (1969) compresses these into existence, relatedness and growth, allows several to operate at once, and adds frustration–regression: a person frustrated at a higher level falls back on a lower one. Frederick Herzberg's two-factor theory (The Motivation to Work, 1959, from interviews with about two hundred engineers and accountants in Pittsburgh) separates hygiene factors (company policy, supervision, salary, interpersonal relations, working conditions, job security), whose absence dissatisfies but whose presence merely removes dissatisfaction, from motivators (achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement, growth), which produce satisfaction; the opposite of satisfaction is "no satisfaction", not dissatisfaction. David McClelland identified the needs for achievement, affiliation and power, and linked the achievement motive to entrepreneurship. Douglas McGregor's Theory X assumes people dislike work and must be coerced; Theory Y assumes they will exercise self-direction towards objectives they are committed to. William Ouchi's Theory Z (1981) described the Japanese-style firm of long-term employment and collective decision-making.

Process theories ask how motivation works. Victor Vroom's expectancy theory (Work and Motivation, 1964) makes motivational force the product of expectancy (the belief that effort leads to performance), instrumentality (the belief that performance leads to a reward) and valence (the value of the reward): M = E × I × V, so that if any term is zero, motivation is zero. Lyman Porter and Edward Lawler extended it (1968) by adding abilities, role perceptions and the perceived equity of rewards, and by arguing that performance leads to satisfaction rather than the reverse. J. Stacy Adams's equity theory (1963) holds that people compare the ratio of their outcomes to inputs with that of a referent other; perceived inequity, whether under-reward or over-reward, motivates them to restore balance by changing inputs or outcomes, distorting perceptions, changing the referent, or leaving — which is why wage differentials and relativities matter as much as wage levels. Edwin Locke's goal-setting theory (1968) holds that specific, difficult goals, accepted by the employee and accompanied by feedback, lead to higher performance than vague "do your best" goals.