Topic 2: Personality and Learning Flashcards
(27 cards)
What is personality?
-Personality is the relatively stable set of psychological characteristics that influences the way an individual interacts with their environment and how they feel, think, and behave.
-Although personality is relatively stable, adult learning experiences may cause a change in one’s personality.
What is the disposition approach?
-The disposition approach assumes that individuals have stable traits or characteristics that influence their attitudes or behaviours, and that individuals are predisposed to behave a certain way.
-For this reason, after the second world war, the military began to issue personality tests as part of their selection process.
What is the situational approach?
-According to the situational approach, characteristics of the organizational setting, such as rewards and punishment, influence people’s feelings, attitudes, and behaviour.
-Many studies found that job satisfaction and work related attitudes are determined by situational factors, like the characteristics of work tasks.
What is the interactionist approach?
-The interactionist approach suggests that individuals attitudes and behaviour are a function of both dispositions and the situation.
-To predict and understand organizational behaviour, we must understand the individual’s personality and the situation in which they work.
-In weak situations with loosely defined roles, few rules, and weak reward and punishment contingencies, personality will have the most impact.
-In strong situations, with more defined roles, rules, and contingencies, personality has less impact.
What is trait activation theory?
Trait activation theory suggests that presonality traits only influence people’s behaviour when the situation calls for particular personality characteristics.
What was one of the main problems with the early research on personality?
The use of inadequate measures of personality characteristics.
How does the Big 5 predict a person’s motivation?
-Neuroticism and conscientiousness are the strongest predictors of motivation.
-There was a strong correlation between neuroticism and lack of motivation.
-There was a strong correlation between conscientiousness and motivation.
How does the Big 5 predict job satisfaction?
-The strongest predictor of job satisfaction was emotional stability.
-Conscientiousness was the next highest predictor of job satisfaction–because they have a strong locus of control, and take care of whatever is in their control. However, during covid-19, conscientious people faced more job strain.
-Extraversion was the third highest predictor.
-Agreeableness predicted job satisfaction to a lesser extent.
-Oppeness vs traditionalness didn’t impact job satisfaction at all.
How does the Big Five predict career success?
High conscientiousness, extraversion, and emotional stability are positively correlated with income and occupational status. Conscientious people in childhood are less likely to be unemployed as adults.
What is behaviorual plasticity theory?
-People with low self-esteem are more susceptible to external and social influences than those with high self esteem.
-Employees with low self-esteem react poorly to negative feedback, and it lowers their future performance.
-Managers should be cautious in using punishment with employees with low self-esteem.
-If external factors are thought to be made responsible for a performance problem, that should be made very clear.
-Managers should correct criticism at the performance difficulty and not the person.
-Managers should not assign those with low self-esteem to jobs that inherently provide lots of negative feedback.
What are the four traits that make up a person’s core self evaluation?
1) Self-esteem
2) General self-efficacy
3) Locus of control
4) Emotional stability
When does learning occur?
Learning occurs when practice or experience leads to a relatively permanent change in behaviour potential.
What is the difference between intrapersonal skills and interpersonal skills?
-Intrapersonal skills are skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, learning about alternative work processes, and risk taking.
How can managers increase the likelihood of the punishment working?
1) The punishment must be aversive.
2) Punish immediately
3) Do not reward unwanted behaviours before or after punishment. E.g. don’t goof off with your staff and then get them in trouble for that same thing later
4) Do not accidentally punish desirable behaviour.
What is social cognitive theory?
-Social cognitive theory (SCT0 suggests that human behaviour can best be explained through a system of triadic reciprocal causation: a three way interaction between personal factors (e.g., cognitive skills, emotions, biological events), behavior (e.g., actions and choices), and environmental influences (e.g., social context, culture, external feedback)
-Social cognitive theory emphasizes the role of cognitive processes in regulating people’s behaviour.
What are some of the challenges of using punishment? How effective is punishment?
1) Punishment provides a clear signal which activities are inappropriate, but it doesn’t offer any sign of replacement activities. E.g. if a person makes a personal call after completing their work, and the boss punishes them without saying what they should have done instead, that will likely frustrate the employee, and fail to improve performance.
2) Punishment evokes a strong emotional reaction on the side of the punished individual. It’s especially problematic if the manger is emotional during the punishment, or if the punishment happens in front of other people.
Key Note: Punishment only temporarily suppresses the unwanted response.
What is the difference between negative reinforcement and punishment?
Negative reinforcement removes a nasty stimulus to increase the probability of behaviour while punishment applies a nasty stimulus to decrease the probability of that behaviour.
What is the difference between negative reinforcement and punishment?
Negative reinforcement removes a nasty stimulus to increase the probability of behaviour while punishment applies a nasty stimulus to decrease the probability of that behaviour.
What are the two strategies to reduce the probability of learned behaviour?
1) Extinction: Involves terminating the reinforcement that is maintaining some unwanted behaviour. E.g. “don’t encourage them”. Extinction should also be coupled with reinforcement of some desired substitute behaviour.
2) Punishment
What is social recognition?
It involves informal acknowledgement, attention, praise, approval, or genuine appreciation.
When is performance feedback most effective?
1) It is conveyed in a positive manner
2) It is delivered immediately after the performance is observed
3) Represented visually in a graph or chart form
4) Specific to the bhaviour that is being targetted for feedback
What is discrepancy reduction?
Discrepancy reduction occurs when a discrepancy exists between an individuals goals and their performance, which motivates them to modify their behaviour in the pursuit of goal attainment.
What is organizational behaviour modification?
-Organizational behaviour modification involves the systematic use of learning principles to influence organizational behaviour.
-OB Mod has showed improvement in safety, and task performance.
What four things do employee recognition programs need to specify to be effective?
-60 percent of Canadians said that their employer’s recognition program does not motivate them to do a good job?
-For an employee recognition program to be successful, it must specify:
1) How the person will be recognized
2) The type of behaviour encouraged
3) The manner of the pubic acknowledgement
4) A token or icon of the event for the recipient
