Organizational Behaviour: Chapter 4 Review

Emotions: Physiological, behaviour, and psychological experienced toward an object, person, or

event that create a state of readiness.

Core Effect: an associated valence that signals the perceived object or event that should be
approached or avoided.

Attitudes: The cluster of beliefs, assessed feelings, and behavioural intentions towards a person,
object, or event (called an attitude object).

Beliefs: are the established perceptions about the attitude object - what you believe to be true.
These beliefs are perceived facts that you acquire from experience and other forms of learning.

Feelings: represents your conscious positive or negative evaluations of the attitude object. Some
people think mergers are good; others think they are bad.

Behaviour Intentions: represent your motivation to engage in a particular behaviour regarding

the attitude object.

Cognitive Dissonance: An emotional experience caused by a perception that our beliefs, feelings
and behaviour are incongruent with one another. Your feelings toward mergers motivate your
behaviour intentions, and which actions you choose depends on your past experiences,
personality, and social norms of appropriate behaviour.

Emotional labour: The effort, planning, and control needed to express organizationally desired
emotions during interpersonal transactions.

Surface acting: pretending to display the expected emotions.

Regulating Emotions: five strategies for regulating emotions.

Change the situation: moving out of or into work settings that produce or avoid specific
emotions. Taking a short walk.

Modify the situation: Within the same physical location, people modify that setting to create or
avoid specific emotions. Stop working on a task that is hard and move on to something
enjoyable.

Suppress or amplify emotions: Trying to block out thoughts that produce dysfunctional
emotions or more actively think about things that produce expected emotions.

Shift attention: Changing the focus of our attention. Suppose that earlier today you led a client
presentation that didn’t go well. Do something else that takes your mind off the presentation.
Reframe the situation: cognitive re-evaluation of a particular event that generates more
desirable emotions. Rather than viewing a client presentation as a failure, you might reframe
the event as a learning moment that had a low probability of success.

Emotional Intelligence: A set of abilities to perceive and express emotion, assimilate emotion in
thought, understand and reason with emotion, and regulate emotion in oneself and others.

Awareness of our own emotions: Ability to perceive and understand the meaning of our own
emotions. People with higher emotional intelligence have better awareness of their emotions
and are better able to make sense of them.

Management of our own emotions: Everyone manages their own emotions to some extent. We
suppress disruptive impulses and try not to feel angry or frustrated when events go against us.

Awareness of others’ emotions: Ability to perceive and understand the emotions of other
people. It relates to empathy-having an understanding of and sensitivity to the feelings,
thoughts, and situation of others.

Management of others’ emotions: managing other people’s emotions. It includes consoling

people who feel sad, emotionally inspiring team members to complete a class project on time,
getting strangers to feel comfortable working with you.

Job satisfaction: A person’s evaluation of their job and work context.

EVLN model: The four ways, as indicated in the name, that employees respond to job
dissatisfaction.

Exit: Leaving the organization, transferring to another work unit, or at least trying to get away
from the dissatisfying situation.

Voice: Any attempt to change, rather than escape from, the dissatisfying situation.
Recommending ways to improve situations.

Loyalty: As an outcome of weather people chose exit or voice, weather the quality for both of
them is high or low.

Neglect: Reducing work effort, paying less attention to quality, increasing absenteeism and
lateness. It is a passive activity with negative consequences for the organization.

Service profit chain model: A theory explaining how employee’s job satisfaction influences
company profitability indirectly through service quality, customer loyalty, and related factors.
Affective organizational commitment: An individual emotional attachment to, involvement in,
and identification with an organization.

Continuance commitment: An individual’s calculative attachment to an organization.

Norm of reciprocity: A felt obligation and social expectation of helping or otherwise giving
something of value to someone who has already helped or given something of value to you.

Justice and support: Affective commitment is higher in organizations that support organizational
justice. Similarly, organizations that support employee well-being tend to cultivate higher levels
of loyalty in return.

Shared values: refers to a person’s identification with the organization, and that identification is
highest when employees believe their values are congruent with the organization’s dominant
values.

Trust: refers to positive expectations one person has toward another person or group in
situations involving risk, putting faith in others.

Organizational comprehension: refers to how well employees understand the organization,

including its strategic direction, social dynamics, and physical layout. This awareness is a
necessary prerequisite to affective commitment because it is difficult to identify with or feel
loyal to something that you don’t know very well.

Employee involvement: increases affective commitment by strengthening the employee’s

psychological ownership and social identity with the organization.

Stress: An adaptive response to a situation that is perceived as challenging or threatening to the

person’s well-being.

Distress: The degree of physiological, psychological, and behavioural deviation from healthy
functioning.

Eustress: is a necessary part of life because it activates and motivates people to achieve goals,
change their environments, and succeed in life’s challenges.

General adaptation syndrome: A model of the stress experience, consisting of three stages:
alarm reaction, resistance, and exhaustion.

The alarm stage: occurs when a threat or challenge activates the physiological stress responses,
The individual’s energy level and coping effectiveness decrease in response to the initial shock.
Resistance: activates various biochemical, psychological, and behavioural mechanisms that give
the individual more energy and engage coping mechanisms to overcome or remove the source
of stress.

Exhaustion: A lot of people are unable to remove the source of stress or remove ourselves from
that source before becoming too exhausted.

Emotional exhaustion: The tiredness, a lack of energy, and a feeling that one’s emotional
resources are depleted.

Cynicism or depersonalization: an indifferent attitude toward work, emotional detachment from

clients, a cynical view of the organization, and a tendency to strictly follow rules and regulations
rather than adapt to the needs of others.

Reduced personal accomplishment: entails feelings of diminished confidence in one’s ability to

perform the job well. Employees develop a sense of learned helplessness as they no longer
believe that their efforts make a difference.

Stressors: Environmental conditions that place a physical or emotional demand on the person.

Organizational constraints: This stressor includes lack of equipment, supplies, budget funding,
co-worker support, information, and other resources necessary to complete the required work.

Interpersonal conflict: Organizations consist of groups of people working interdependently

toward some purpose. But even though they share common organizational goals, employees
experience conflict because they frequently disagree with each other regarding how to achieve
those goals as well as how the work and resources should be distributed along that journey.

Work overload: evident when employees consume more of their personal time to get the job
done. Technology and globalization also contribute to work overload because they tether
employees to work for more hours of the day.

Low task control: Workplace stress is higher when employees lack control over how and when
they perform their tasks as well as over the pace of work activity. Work is potentially more
stressful when it is paced by a machine, involves monitoring equipment, or when the work
schedule is controlled by someone else.

Workaholics: have an uncontrollable work motivation, constantly think about work, and have
low work enjoyment.

Remove the stressor: There are many ways to remove the stressor, but some of the more
common actions involve assigning employees to jobs that match their skills and preferences,
reducing excessive workplace noise, having a complaint system and taking corrective action
against harassment, and giving employees more control over the work process.
Withdraw from the stressor: Removing the stressor may be the ideal solution, but it isn’t
feasible in every situation. Another strategy is to permanently or temporarily remove
employees from the stressor.

Change stress perceptions: How much stress employees experience depends on how they
perceive the stressor. Consequently, another way to manage stress is by coaching employees to
improve their self-concept, personal goal setting, and self-reinforcement practices.

Control stress consequences: Keeping physically fit and maintaining a healthy lifestyle are
effective stress management strategies because they control stress consequences. Good
physical fitness reduces the adverse physiological consequences of stress by helping employees
moderate their breathing and heart rate, muscle tension, and stomach acidity.

Receive social support: Social support occurs when co-workers, supervisors, family members,
friends, and others provide emotional and/ or informational support to buffer an individual’s
stress experience.