Introduction
Individual attitudes is about evaluative statements about people and its components include cognitive where we have beliefs, knowledge, opinions and the intention of behaving in a given way. An important attitude is job satisfaction because it can affect productivity because when employees are satisfied, customer satisfaction also increase and dissatisfied employees misbehave in the work place leading to low productivity and low quality products. Individuals are able to reconcile inconsistencies that exist between behavior and attitude and align their behavior and attitude to appear consistent and rational. (Haynes, 2007 pp15-16)
Organization behavior investigates the impact individual attitudes have on organization behavior in order to apply that knowledge to improve effectiveness of organization. In an organization, collection of people work together to be able to achieve variety of goals, these goals are for various individuals who are in the organization and for organization as a whole. Organizations aim at providing goods and services to people and the goods and services come from the product of workers behavior. (Haynes, 2007 pp13-14)
Organization behavior studies factors that have impact on how individual act and respond in organization and the way organization is able to manage its environment. There is assumption by many people that it is intuitive to understand human behavior in an organization, there is belief that a happy worker is the most productive worker where its truth is only in special cases. In studying organization behavior, there concepts, tools and theories used by people to understand, describe and analyze what happen in an organization and the reason why it happen. (Goffin 2003pp33-37)
Description of how values influence organizational behavior
Values in an organization are ideas and beliefs about the goals to be pursued by organization members and standards of behavior used by members to achieve the goals. Organization values develop the norms, expectations and guidelines used to prescribe appropriate behavior of employees and control how organization members behave towards each other. In determining corporate culture, senior management imposes corporate values to reflect organization objectives and have internal culture in the workforce. Work groups in the organization have interactions and behavior which affect the whole organization.
For an organization to be effective, it must identify and develop concise, clear and shared meaning of beliefs and values for everyone to understand and make a contribution so that these well defined values may impact all the aspects in the organization. Unless people see the impact of values they might feel fooled or misled hence these values need to be nurtured and supported. (Bilsky, 1987 pp18-21)
People must model and demonstrate these values in personal work behaviors, interpersonal interaction and decision making. The values in the organization help every person to establish priorities in their day to day activities. Every decision made is guided by value if the values are created in a cooperative way and there are value statements. Recognition and rewards in the organization are supposed to be structured in a manner that will recognize the people with work that embodies organizational values. (Becker, 1992 pp20-22)
Describing how personality influence organization behavior
Each person has his or her own unique personality that shows the behavior or reaction to different situations. In determining personality, many factors need to be considered like heredity traits and environmental settings. Personality of a person can affect self esteem as individual feeling of self-worth, self monitoring and being able to base behavior on the social cues. Today, we have theories that measure personality of a person such as psychodynamic theory, integrative approach, trait theory and humanistic theory. (Goffin, 2007 pp23-26)
Rosenberg scale is used to measure self esteem where the trait of self esteem of individual in a given environment is measured. This determines who has high or low esteem and what caused them to have it. In an organization, people with low esteem are not able to use strategies for self protection effectively. According to research on social comparison, many people use ethnicity and gender to be separate from one another or achieve higher self esteem.
Study of personality has insights on how people behave. Personality is the way a person understands and views him and how he is able to interact with other people or react to any given situation. The attempt by people to understand themselves is personal concept and self esteem is the peoples self image and competence that is self perceived. In an organization people with high self esteem are able to work well in managerial positions and help other employees who are under them work well and become productive. Self perceptions are the ability of a person to cope with different situations immediately they arise and cope with tough jobs. (Rothstein, 2006 pp12-17)
Describing how ethics influence organization behavior
The influence of ethics in decision making and effect of technology on stress related to work are organizational behavior trends that are found in organizations. The basic business ethics is applying standards and principles to the moral dilemmas and knowing what is right or wrong in any business transaction. In the organization, individuals are supposed to be united in every work they perform and have high moral principles. In any ethical practice, there must be awareness, consequences and use of social and personal values. (Richardson, 1994 pp13-15)
Moral judgments characterize the process where people determine whether the course of action in any particular situation is either morally right or wrong. In order for organization to be founded on beliefs that are ethical, a workforce must be employed and be aware of consequences of decisions made and hire people concerned with effect of everyone who are connected with organization.
Decision making practice is set off through confirming moral issues where there is understanding that ethical dilemma exists and organizational and individual issues affect ethical decision making. It is possible to avoid ethical conflicts today because human exchanges are becoming complicated and numerous. Knowing how to get solution to conflicts that have no prejudice against the parties involved are examples of ethical issues that occur in the workplace regularly. Stress in the work place is increasing and everybody faces stress once in a while. It is difficult to do away with situations that lead to stress but stress may be managed effectively in any organization. (Paine, 1994 pp11-14)
Describing how cultural differences influence organizational behavior
Cultural differences are very obvious today. Majority of the societies are multicultural and many organizations operate across cultural and geographical boundaries. People see themselves as being unique and parochial which is not strategy for the future. An individual with parochial perspective does not recognize ways of living and working of different people and believe that these differences must have serious consequences. Today, there is new technology for communication that has made it possible to cross boundaries and communicate easily across space. However, this does not help to communicate intercultural in order to share meanings that require that we get to understand cultural differences and be able to share cultural information. (Frost, 1985 pp14-17)
Cross cultural observations can be contaminated and tainted by many other factors. Status differences that are perceived create cultural barriers between different cultures within the organization. For example, managers and instructors may have difference in status with workers and technical assistants they work together with. a person who has status difference will show by either actions or word that he values potential contributions of the people she work with and if this fails to happen, what will be obtained is not commitment but compliance.
When there is cultural differences in an organization, workers do not participate easily because some of them may be favored and others discriminated. The ones who are discriminated due to the culture where they belong are not motivated to make positive contribution to the organization and this result to decrease in organizations productivity and workers fail to unite and perform their duties as a team for the benefit of the organization as a whole. (Tomada, 1997 pp11-13)
References
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