Course Title: Organizational Behavior

Course Code: MKT-511

Reflective Journal on Organizational Behavior

Submitted by
Ishrat Jahan , ID: 41839002
Najiha Afnan, ID: 41839007
Zania Binta Zulfiquar, ID: 41839045
Semester: Fall
Batch: 39, Section: A
Submitted to
Professor Dr. Imrana Yasmin
Department of Marketing
University of Dhaka
Date of submission: 28.11.2018

Evening MBA program

University of Dhaka
 Organizational Behavior Reflective Journal

This Reflective journal on Organizational Behavior course’s major learning is prepared as partial

requirement of the course ‘Organizational Behavior’ , Course code- MKT-511, instructed by Professor

Dr. Imrana Yasmin, Department of Marketing, University of Dhaka.

A reflective journal is a personal account of an educational experience that offers a variety of benefits,

from enhancing our writing skills and helping us retain information to express our thoughts on new ideas

and theories.

This reflective journal is the outcome of our three member group effort. We have focused on five major

learning of our course which are:

 Job satisfaction

 Personality trait

 Values

 Perception

 Motivation

We have tried to explain why we have chosen these topics, how we can implement our learning in our

practical profession and what potential barrier we may face while applying these learning.

Job Satisfaction

Research suggests that satisfied workforce will likely to influence positively in organizational

effectiveness. Satisfied employee gradually turn into productive employee who contribute continuously

for the benefit of the organization.

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What Causes Job Satisfaction?

 Job Conditions

 Personality

 Pay

 Corporate Social Responsibility

Interesting jobs that provide training, variety, independence, and control satisfy most employees.

Interdependence, feedback, social support, and interaction with co-workers outside the workplace are

strongly related to job satisfaction even after accounting for characteristics of the work itself.

Outcomes of Job Satisfaction:

 Job Performance

 Organizational Citizenship Behavior

 Customer Satisfaction

 Life Satisfaction

The Impact of Job Satisfaction

 Exit: The exit response directs behavior toward leaving the organization, including looking for a

new position as well as resigning.

 Voice: The voice response includes actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions,

including suggesting improvements, discussing problems with superiors, and undertaking some

forms of union activity.

 Loyalty: The loyalty response means passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to

improve, including speaking up for the organization in the face of external criticism and trusting

the organization and its management to do the right thing.

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  Neglect: The neglect response passively allows conditions to worsen and includes chronic

absenteeism or lateness, reduced effort, and increased error rate.

Personality Trait

We have learnt about personality trait in our Organizational Behavior course.

We have learnt about Myers-Brigs type indicator and big five personality model. We will focus on the

later in this reflective journal as research supports that five basic dimensions underlie all others and

encompass most of the significant variation in human personality. Test scores of these traits can provide

a better picture about how people will react in various real life situations.

Following are the big five factors:

 Extraversion- Extraversion dimension captures our comfort level with relationships. Extraverts

tend to be gregarious, assertive and sociable. Introverts tend to be reserved, quiet, timid.

 Agreeableness- Agreeableness dimension refers to an individual’s propensity to defer to others.

Highly agreeable people are cooperative, warm and trusting. People who score low on

agreeableness are cold, disagreeable and antagonistic.

 Conscientiousness- The conscientiousness is a measure of reliability. A highly conscientious

people is responsible, organized, dependable and persistent. Those who score low on this

dimension are easily distracted, disorganized and unreliable.

 Emotional stability- The emotional stability taps a person’s ability to withstand stress. People

with positive emotional stability tend to be calm, self confident and secure. Those with high

negative scores tend to be nervous, anxious, depressed and insecure.

 Openness to experience- The openness to experience dimension addresses range of interests and

fascination with novelty. Extremely open people are creative, curious, artistically sensitive. On

the other hand, less open people are conventional and find comfort in the familiar.

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How personality trait model can be implemented in practical life

Personality affects almost all aspects of our life, how we react to others, how we deal with stressful

situations, how we handle our job, how we make our relationships work. In this journal we will discuss

how we can use this model in employee hiring decision making as a manager of our organization, as we

have found that it is tremendously important to recognize personality traits and pair employees with the

responsibilities that fits their personalities the best.

For example, if we want constantly improving, deadline and objective driven, goal and priority oriented,

organized, thorough and accurate employee, then we will need someone who has industriousness,

orderliness and has to score high in conscientiousness measure.

If our job requires someone who is calm, composed, skillfully deals with stressful situation, impartial

during conflicting demands, we will need someone with better score in emotional stability.

If we need someone with outspoken, attracts people with friendly interactions, pleasant, conveys a

positive attitude and outlook, builds a positive team spirit, then we need to hire someone with high score

in extraversion.

To implement this model in hiring decision, at first we need to identify the demands of the role we are

recruiting. We need to assess whether we need a team player or someone loves to work independently?

We need to identify our organizations culture, flexible or strict? Will the role require a lot of creativity

or need orderliness and analytical ability? Once we have identified the personality of the role, we can

use big five model to find out how each candidate match with our requirement through written or oral

assessment process. Thus we can improve our candidate selection process.

Potential obstacles we may face while applying big five model

 Research suggest that extremely conscientious people do not perform better than those who are

simply average in conscientiousness. Probably because they’re so organized and structured,

conscientious people don’t adapt as well to changing contexts. They are generally performance

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 oriented and have more trouble learning complex skills early in the training process because their

focus is on performing well rather than on learning.

 One downside with people high in extraversion is that they are more impulsive than introverts; they

are more likely to be absent from work and engage in risky behavior such as drinking, and other

impulsive or sensation-seeking acts. Study also found extraverts were more likely than introverts to

lie during job interviews.

 As per research, people high in openness, are especially susceptible to workplace accidents.

 One downside is that agreeableness is associated with lower levels of career success (especially

earnings).

Values

Values represent basic convictions that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally

or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence. They contain

a judgmental element in that they carry an individual’s ideas as to what is right, good, or desirable. Values

have both content and intensity attributes. The content attribute says a mode of conduct or end-state of

existence is important. The intensity attribute specifies how important it is. When we rank an individual’s

values in terms of their intensity, we obtain that person’s value system. All of us have a hierarchy of

values that forms our value system. We find it in the relative importance we assign to values such as

freedom, pleasure, self-respect, honesty, obedience, and equality.

The Importance of Values

Values lay the foundation for our understanding of people’s attitudes and motivation and influence our

perceptions. Values cloud objectivity and rationality, they influence attitudes and behavior.

Value system is A hierarchy based on a ranking of an individual’s values in terms of their intensity.

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Terminal values: Desirable end-states of existence; the goals a person would like to achieve during his

or her lifetime.

Instrumental values: Preferable modes of behavior or means of achieving one’s terminal values.

International Values

Power distance: A national culture attribute that describes the extent to which a society accepts that

power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally.

Individualism: A national culture attribute that describes the degree to which people prefer to act as

individuals rather than as members of groups.

Collectivism: A national culture attribute that describes a tight social framework in which people expect

others in groups of which they are a part to look after them and protect them.

Masculinity: A national culture attribute that describes the extent to which the culture favors traditional

masculine work roles of achievement, power, and control. Societal values are characterized by

assertiveness and materialism.

Femininity: A national culture attribute that indicates little differentiation between male and female

roles; a high rating indicates that women are treated as the equals of men in all aspects of the society.

Uncertainty avoidance: A national culture attribute that describes the extent to which a society

feels threatened by uncertain and ambiguous situations and tries to avoid them.

Long-term orientation: A national culture attribute that emphasizes the future, thrift, and persistence.

Short-term orientation: A national culture attribute that emphasizes the past and present, respect for

tradition, and fulfillment of social obligations.

How we can implement concept of values in practical life

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There is an argument that people are attracted to and selected by organizations that match their values

and they leave organizations that are compatible with their personality. This concept is known as person-

organization fit theory. As a manager of our organization, if we need to recruit new employee for a

position, we need to think about person-organization fit to a great extent. As link between person-

organization fit is very strong, the more an individual fits with an organization, the more he will display

higher level of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Individual do not enjoy working for a

company that does not fit well with their personal values, as a result job switching tendency increases.

So when we are recruiting new head for our company, we need to identify our organization’s values and

cultures, then hunt the perfect employee who is perfectly compatible with our organization.

Perception

Perception is the way of thinking about someone, somebody or something. In an organization how a

person will behave or what will be the situation is the basic cognitive or psychological process which is

as known as Perception. What we perceive can be substantially different from objective reality or it

becomes the reality from which we act.

Often the main aspects of perception in an organization is how an individual view other, as this can be a

major point in how that person will behave within the business. Perception is influenced by some factors

which can reside in the perceiver, the object or target being perceived, or the situation in the perception

made. Many of our perceptions of others are formed by first impressions and small cues that have little

supporting evidence. From observing people, our perception and judgement of a person’s actions make

us assume about that person’s state of mind. Attribution theory suggests from observing people’s

behavior help us to determine whether it was internally or externally caused depends largely on three

factors which are:

 Distinctiveness

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  Consensus

 Consistency

Distinctiveness Refers how people behave in different situations. If all people behave same in similar

situation shows consensus & people’s action is the consistency for an observer. Internally caused

behavior are those for an observer believes to be under the personal behavioral control of another person.

How we can use Attribute theory in our professional practices

 Attribution theory is significant for organizations because it helps managers understand some of

the causes of employee behavior and assists employees in understanding their thinking about their

own behaviors.

 The concept of attribution theory effectively advances our understanding of people perception by

helping us identify the reason for the actions you take and understand the reasons behind the

actions other people take.

 The perception of the causes of a certain behavior can affect the judgment and actions of both

managers and employees in motivation, It may also play a vital role.

 We want to attribute causes to these behaviors, which should give we some felling of control over

our own behaviors and related situations.

Errors or biases distort attribution. When we judgement other people we underestimate external factors

and overestimate internal factors from which we are going to get some knowledge about it:

 Fundamental attribution error: To know about someone’s tendency to make crass and assumed

character for judgment we get result of primarily internal influences, rather than external. Not

only that, but it suggests that perception of our own behaviors attenuates primarily towards the

opposite — that external factors are of greater influence to our outcome-prompting actions than

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 internal factors. It can explain if I’m in sales team as sales manager my attributed the poor

performance of my sales agents to laziness rather than to a competitor’s innovative product line.

People & organizations tend to attribute their own successes to internal factors such as bad luck

or difficult coworkers.

 Self-Serving Bias: People’s tendency to accept positivity and to reject negativity. They take

positivity for their own character but attribute negativity to external factors. For example, if my

organization meets its target, it will always take credits for internal factor and if it can’t meet its

desire; it will blame its unfortunate market demands or uncertainty of market.

Motivation

Motivation is the process that count on an individual’s intensity, direction and persistence of effort

toward attain a goal. How hard a person tries is described by intensity. High intensity leads to favorable

job-performance outcomes if the effort is channeled in a direction which benefits the organization. For

Organization’s goals our effort should be seeking & for that motivation get a persistence dimension. This

measures how long a person can effort.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow developed a theory point out that humans are motivated to satisfy

five basic needs. These needs are placed in a hierarchy which is the best-known theory of Abraham

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow suggested that first we seek to satisfy the lowest level of needs.

Once if it is done, we seek to satisfy each of the higher level of need up to we have satisfied all five

needs.

Later on, Maslow extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. From the

down of hierarchy top, the needs are:

 Physiological needs are biological requirements for human survival, air, food, drink, shelter,

clothing, warmth, sex, sleep.

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  Safety needs are security, protection from danger and freedom from pain.

 Social - belongingness include such things as love, acceptance, and belonging. In this level, the

need of emotional relationships drives human behavior.

 Esteem include that People develop a concern with getting recognition, status, importance, and

respect from others. Most humans have the feeling to be respected; this includes the need to have

self-esteem and self-respect.

 Self-actualization refers to self- fulfillment. This is about the desire to develop and realize that

someone is full potential to become everything that they can be.

How we can use Hierarchy Theory in organization

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Theory for organizational structures by identifying those that are relevant

to a work environment. Employees have some needs that they expect to fulfill in the workplace. The

most basic needs require is organizational flexibility that lets employees take breaks for snacks and

meals. A stable organization with clear responsibilities provides security. everybody wants a good salary

to meet the needs of their family and they want to work in a stable environment. For example, if

employees get insurance, safety and give support if anything unexpected occur from the organization

they work these things will increase their sense of safety and security and make them feel more

comfortable in their workplace.

Potential obstacles we may face while applying Hierarchy Theory in organization

 The major problem of Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory is that it can’t be verified practically,

because there is no proper method dimension how satisfied one level must be to move forward

next level. So an organization can’t get the summit of it’s employee’s satisfaction level.

 The theory does not describes cultural differences, but assumes that the same needs will apply

equally to all human societies.

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  The concept of self-actualization suffers of fuzzy definitions and a lack of evidence other than

improbable.

 The theory does not describes the different needs theory for different individuals and for that it is

not applicable for all type of employees like lower to higher level.

These were the five major learnings from our Organizational Behavior course. We have tried to cover

the reflection of our learning process throughout the course and hopefully it will help us in future to take

constructive decision in our personal and professional life.

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