Foundations of Individual Behavior Summary of Core Ideas

Chapter 2 will be covered about the topic: foundations of individual behavior. There are three foundations of individual behavior in organizations: ability, attitudes and learning. Exactly, knowing how intellectual ability contributes to job performance, how employee’s attitudes about their jobs affect the workplace, how people learn behaviors and what management can do to shape those behaviors. Moreover, job satisfaction is also an important implication for organizational behavior.

The requirement of job and the ability of the employees are 2 factors a recruiter considers. Ability refers to an individual’s capacity to perform the various tasks in a job. High ability-job fit means that employee performance is enhanced when an employee and position are well matched.

Attitudes, which is the second foundation, are evaluative statement-either favorable or unfavorable-concerning objects, people or event. They also reflect how one feels about something. There are three components of attitude: cognition, affect and behavior. These components are closely related. To illustrate, the employee of the X said that he will be decreased the salary because the company want to recruit more employees. The manager is unfair (cognitive-evaluation). Thus, he does not want to work with this company (affective-feeling). Later, he looking for another job and complaining about his manager for everyone (behavioral-action).

There are three major job attitudes and one sub attitude that we study: job satisfaction, job involvement, organizational commitment and perceived organizational support( POS). To be more detail, organizational commitment has three more dimensions: affective commitment, continuance commitment, normative commitment. Besides that, in POS, there is one new concept we have to learn that is employee engage ment. Understanding these attitudes can help us to behave and treat well not only our co- worker but also our employee in the far future.

Job satisfaction is positive...