Organization Behaviour

1. OB Unit 1

8. Why do we study OB(Contd.)
• OB helps to learn about thyself and how to deal with others
• Organizational Behavior is a way of thinking.
• Organizational Behavior is multidisciplinary and it helps us multiple ways.
• There is a distinctly humanistic orientation with OB.
• The field of organizational behavior is performance oriented.
• Organizational Behavior satisfies the need to understand and predict.
• It helps us to test personal theories.
• OB helps the managers to understand the basis of motivation and what he should
do to motivate his subordinates.
• OB helps to maintain cordial industrial relations which help to increase the overall
productivity of the industry.
• The subject of organizational behavior is useful in the field of marketing.
• This helps greatly in improving bur inter-personal relations in the organizations.
Friendly and cordial relations between employees and management and also
among the employees create a congenial work environment in organizations.

9. Personality

19. Attitude

25. Cognitive Dissonance
• Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation
involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or
behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort
leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes,
beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and
restore balance, etc.
• For example, when people smoke (behavior) and
they know that smoking causes cancer
(cognition), they are in a state of cognitive
dissonance.

26. • How Attitude Change Takes Place
• Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory
suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all
our attitudes and behavior in harmony and avoid
disharmony (or dissonance). This is known as the
principle of cognitive consistency.
• When there is an inconsistency between
attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something
must change to eliminate the dissonance

27. Dissonance can be reduced in one of
three ways:
• Change one or more of the attitudes, behavior, beliefs, etc., to make the relationship
between the two elements a consonant one.-When one of the dissonant elements is a
behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior.However, this mode of
dissonance reduction frequently presents problems for people, as it is often difficult for
people to change well-learned behavioral responses (e.g., giving up smoking).
• Acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs. For example, thinking smoking
causes lung cancer will cause dissonance if a person smokes.However, new information such
as “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer” may reduce the
dissonance.
• Reduce the importance of the cognitions (i.e., beliefs, attitudes). A person could convince
themself that it is better to "live for today" than to "save for tomorrow."In other words, he
could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a
long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of the
dissonant cognition (smoking is bad for one's health)

28. Self Perception Theory

29. • In simple terms, it illustrates that “we are
what we do." According to self-perception
theory, we interpret our own actions the way
we interpret others’ actions, and our actions
are often socially influenced and not produced
out of our own free will, as we might expect.

30. • In 1974, James Laird conducted two experiments on how changes in
facial expression can trigger changes in emotion.Participants were
asked to contract or relax various facial muscles, causing them to
smile or frown without awareness of the nature of their
expressions. Participants reported feeling more angry when
frowning and happier when smiling. They also reported that
cartoons viewed while they were smiling were more humorous
than cartoons viewed while they were frowning. Laird interpreted
these results as "indicating that an individual's expressive behavior
mediates the quality of his emotional experience.“.In other words, a
person's facial expression can act as a cause of an emotional state,
rather than an effect; instead of smiling because they feel happy, a
person can make themselves feel happy by smiling.