Lecture 5 - Organizational Culture Flashcards

1
Q

Who developed the HEXACO personality model? What are each of the letters?

A
  • Ashton and Lee
  • HEXACO - Honesty/Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to experience
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2
Q

What are the attitudes and behaviours of those high vs. low in honesty/humility?

A
  • High: avoid manipulating others for personal gain; little temptation to break rules; uninterested in possessing lavish wealth; don’t feel entitled to a certain social status. Often trustworthy, humble, and lead by example. May be more gullible.
  • Low: Feel self-important; motivated by material gain; may bend laws for personal profit; flatter other people. Would make a good salesperson.
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3
Q

What can Honesty/Humility help predict?

A
  • Theft
  • Sabotage
  • Rumor spreading
  • Counterproductive behaviours
  • Sexual/personal harassment
  • Narcissism
  • Psychopathy
  • Machiavellianism
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4
Q

What are the attitudes and behaviours of those high vs. low in emotionality?

A
  • High: Fear of physical dangers; experience anxiety in response to life’s stresses; need emotional support; feel sentimental attachments and empathetic concern. Would make good teachers.
  • Low: Unemotional; detached, and independent concerning their relationships; feel little anxiety or fear. Would make good military pilots, and surgeons.
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5
Q

What are the attitudes and behaviours of those high vs. low in extraversion?

A
  • High: Feel confident when leading/addressing groups; enjoy social gatherings; positive self-regard; enthusiastic; energetic
  • Low: More reserved; don’t like being the center of attention; consider themselves unpopular; less lively than others; indifferent to social activities.
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6
Q

What areas of work is extraversion associated with?

A
  • Charismatic leadership
  • Sales
  • Networking
  • Oral presentations
  • Adaptability (keeps people together)
  • Enjoy meetings
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7
Q

What are the attitudes and behaviours of those who are high vs. low in agreeableness?

A
  • High: Compromise and cooperate with others (easy to get along with); lenient; patient; forgiving; not good with conflict/bad negotiators.
  • Low: Feel anger readily; bear grudges; critical of others; stubborn.
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8
Q

What are the attitudes and behaviours of those who are high vs. low in conscientiousness?

A
  • High: Organize things; neat/tidy; disciplined/keep promises; strive for accuracy and perfection; deliberately careful when making decisions (ex. accountant)
  • Low: Cluttered; late; procrastinate; avoid difficult tasks or challenging goals; satisfied with work that contains some errors.
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9
Q

What are the advantages and disadvantages of hiring individuals who are high in conscientiousness?

A
  • Advantages: Best predictor of ‘typical’ performance; predicts achievement motivation
  • Disadvantages: Lower creativity; decision paralysis; perfectionism
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10
Q

What are the attitudes and behaviours of those who are high vs. low in openness to experience?

A
  • High: Appreciate the beauty of art; intellectually curious; interested in unusual ideas/people
  • Low: Unimpressed by most works of art; little interest in the natural or social sciences; avoid creative pursuits; dislike ideas that seem radical/unconventional
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11
Q

What’s one of the strongest and most consistent predictor of job performance?

A
  • Cognitive ability (0.53)
  • Stronger predictor in jobs with higher complexity
  • Can be assessed through cognitive tests such as the Wonderlic 12-minute test (correlates 0.92 with overall IQ)
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12
Q

T/F: Coffee chats are a really good format for an interview.

A
  • FALSE
  • Not very predictive
  • Easy to fake, just need to know how to get along with interviewer
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13
Q

What’s the best, most predictive format for an employment interview?

A
  • Very structured interviews
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14
Q

What are the two structured interview styles?

A
  • Behavioural: the idea that past behaviour predicts future behaviour; ‘tell me about a time when…’; good for experienced applicants
  • Situational: Current judgement predicts future judgement; provides applicant with hypothetical situations; best for inexperienced applicants
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15
Q

What are the 4 major interview structure factors?

A
  • Rapport building - puts the applicant at ease (don’t want to overdo it)
  • Question sophistication - the situational/behavioural questions. based on job analysis info
  • Question consistency - the same questions must be asked in the same order to all applicants. Same interviewer as well, along with the same medium.
  • Evaluation standardization - responses are systematically scored
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16
Q

What are interviews good and bad at assessing?

A
  • Good at assessing previous experience
  • Bad at determining personality and intelligence
17
Q

What must occur if multiple interviewers are going to be used?

A
  • Frame of reference training
18
Q

What does organizational culture drive?

A
  • Decision making
  • Resource allocation
  • Recruiting
  • Marketing
19
Q

What’s the main difference between a company’s mission statement and their culture?

A
  • Mission statement = who we want to be
  • Culture = Who we actually are
  • Mission statements do not always correlate with what culture is like
20
Q

What are the three main purposes of organizational culture?

A
  • Provides a sense of identity
  • Generates commitment to the organization’s mission
  • Clarifies and reinforces standards of behaviours
21
Q

Where does/can culture come from?

A
  • Founders - where it initially comes from
  • Industry - renewable energy vs. oil and gas
  • Geography - impacts how employers think
  • Interaction with the environment - customers, supplies, competitors
  • Who you hire -hiring good leaders will help model/generate culture
22
Q

What’s the competing values framework?

A
  • Uses 4 main quadrants to measure culture (flexibility and discretion; external focus; stability and control; internal focus)
  • The four resulting cultures include adhocracy culture, market culture, hierarchy culture, clan culture
23
Q

What are the weaknesses of the competing values framework?

A
  • Limits culture to one of four boxes based on only two dimensions (focus and control)
  • Not very useful for HR purposes
24
Q

What’s the multidimensional model of organizational cultures?

A
  • Focus on national culture and how it influences corporate culture
  • Based off of IBM stationed in multiple countries
  • Identified five major culture dimensions:
    1) Individualism (vs. collectivism)
    2) Power distance (is status important?)
    3) Masculinity (more aggressive cultures)
    4) Uncertainty avoidance (how comfortable the countries are with uncertainty)
    5) Long-term orientation (good at long-term planning?)
25
Q

What are the advantages vs. disadvantages of the multidimensional model of organizational cultures?

A
  • Advantages: Better than the competing values framework
  • Disadvantages/issues: Focus is on national rather than corporate; original ideas all developed at a single company; limited utility for decision-making at the company level
26
Q

What did the Chapman and Reeves (2018) study discover regarding organizational culture?

A
  • Identified how people described their organizations using a lexical approach
  • Able to determine 8 major factors plus minor facets to form organizational image factors: CSR, dominance, innovativeness, trendy, friendly, prestigious, traditional, pace
27
Q

What are some things to consider when interpreting culture profiles?

A
  • Every company is unique
  • The assessments are based on the shared perceptions of employees
  • Culture may not be uniform across the company (ex. can differ geographically)
  • Can have a dominant culture and then subcultures within the same organization
28
Q

Why study culture?

A
  • Description - want to be able to describe the company to others, want to know how the company is perceived by employees
  • Organizational development - where do we want to be? where are we at now?
  • Merger analysis - want to anticipate points of potential friction to help avoid conflict between companies
29
Q

How should sampling occur in organizations when trying to collect data on organizational culture?

A
  • For small companies (<100), best to involve all employees (population statistics)
  • For larger companies, 120 employees give a good result (from each location). If there are a lot of divisions, try to get 20 from each unit.
30
Q

T/F: Descriptive statistics should be used to provide the best predictions.

A
  • True
31
Q

What are prescriptive statistics?

A
  • Using people’s perceptions of the organization to determine how they want to shape their organizational culture
  • Can use this data to use selective hiring processes
  • This can be done with a small number of assessments from senior management
32
Q

What’s so valuable about SEM when looking at organizational image factors?

A
  • Helps you understand the strength of agreement among workers
  • The larger the SEM, the less agreement you have
  • Might be due to weak culture or a series of distinct subcultures if you have a very large SEM between employees
33
Q

What are the main effects of culture?

A
  • Can have dramatic effects on employee behaviour (ex. dress, meetings)
  • Strong cultures may have a positive effect on performance
  • Employee attitudes (person-culture fit)
  • Influences who applies to work for the company
  • Can influence who leaves the company
34
Q

What are some common challenges when it comes to changing organizational culture?

A
  • Very difficult to change
  • Not a short term project
  • The stronger the culture, the more difficult the change
35
Q

What are the two main approaches to changing organizational culture?

A
  • Employee stocks - changing the attitudes of the employees you currently have (really hard to do)
  • Employee flows - selective hiring and firing to reinforce or change culture. This is most common in senior executive ranks. These positions transmit and amplify culture. This is easier to do in companies with high turnover rates. The idea is that ‘the people make the place’