Important Key Terms Organizational Behavior

Evaluative statements or judgements concerning objects, people, or events

Any incompatibility between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes

A positive feeling about one’s job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics

The degree to which a person identifies with a job, actively participates in it, and considers performance important to self-worth

Employees’ belief in the degree to which they affect their work environment, their competence, the meaningfulness of their job, and their autonomy in their work

The degree to which an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and wishes to maintain membership in the organization

The degree to which people in a country accept that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally

An employee’s involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for the work he or she does

A broad range of feelings that people experience

Intense, discrete, and short-lived feelings experiences that are often caused by a specific event

Feelings that tend to be longer-lived and less intense than emotions and that lack a contextual stimulus

A situation in which an employee expresses organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions at work (employees act like they have to, e.g. flight attendants are always cheerful)

Hiding one’s feelings and forgoing emotional expressions in response to display rules (deals with displayed emotions)

Trying to modify one’s true feelings based on display rules (deals with felt emotions)

Inconsistencies between the emotions people feel and the emotions they project

Reception, attention, and awareness of the present moment, events, and experiences

The ability to detect and to manage emotional cues and information

A process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions to give meaning to their environment

The tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors and put the blame for failures on external factors

The tendency to choose to interpret what one sees based on one’s interests, background, experience, and attitudes

The tendency to draw a positive general impression about an individual based on a single characteristic

The tendency to draw a negative general impression about an individual based on a single characteristic

Evaluation of a person’s characteristics that is affected by comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank higher or lower on the same characteristics

Judging someone based on one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs

A situation in which a person inaccurately perceives a second person and the resulting expectations cause the second person to behave in ways consistent with the original perception. (how an individual’s behavior is determined by others’ expectations)

Choice made from among two or more alternatives

A discrepancy between the current state of affairs and some desired state

Characterized by making consistent, value-maximizing choices within specified constraints

A process of making decisions by constructing simplified models that extract the essential features from problems without capturing all their complexity

An unconscious process created out of distilled experience

An ethical perspective in which decisions are made to provide the greatest good for all

Individuals who report unethical practices by their employer to outsiders

A tendency to be overconfident about our abilities and the abilities of others

A tendency to fixate on initial information, from which one then fails to adjust adequately for subsequent information

The tendency to seek out information that reaffirms past choices and to discount information that contradicts past judgments

The tendency for people to base their judgments on information that is readily available to them

The tendency to believe falsely, after an outcome of an event is actually known, that one would have accurately predicted that outcome

An increased commitment to a previous decision despite negative information

The tendency of individuals to believe that they can predict the outcome of random events

The tendency to prefer a sure gain of a moderate amount over a riskier outcome, even if the riskier outcome might have a higher expected payoff