MBA 1st SEM

UNIT 3 NOTES:
INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOUR: Individual behavior refers to the actions, responses,
reactions, and behaving ways of the individual in a particular position. It is the combination of
responses to internal and external stimuli. Each Individual/human behavior is different from
others .

Factors Influencing Individual Behavior:

Personal Biographical Factors:

Age. Age is the length of time that determines the time a person lived. The age of an individual
start to increase from the day he/she is born. At a young age, people tend to be more creative and
energetic and are curious to explore things.

Education. By birth, people learn to speak, walk, behave, and respond to their surroundings.
Parents and other family members are the first educators of people. From the parents, children
learn the basic education, and morality, and become socialized human beings.

Abilities. It is the personal strength people have. The inherited ability of individuals is greatly
influenced by the health of parents, nutrition, and the environment around them. Abilities can be
inherited or learned.

Marital Status. Married people seem more responsible towards family than other unmarried.
For them steady jobs become important and such employees are expected to devote their best
effort to the workplace.

Psychological Factors:

Personality. Everyone’s personality is unique. Personality refers to the ways a person thinks,
feels, acts, and behaves and which are unique from others. The unique nature of individuals is
the psychological characteristics that they gained from experience and knowledge.

Perception. Perception is the viewpoints of individuals around the world and the interpretation
of the things they see. It is the psychological process of seeing objects and constructing
conclusions. Two persons’ perceptions are different their seeing way of the world probably can
not be the same.

Attitudes. Attitude is the belief system that directs our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Attitude
can be positive or negative as so we differently respond to people, situations, and ideas.
Values. Values are the moral belief and structures of people that guide their actions. Values
consist of an individual’s philosophy as to what is good, right, or desirable and they contain
moral flavor.

Organizational Factors:

Physical Facilities. Physical facilities of an organization refer to the physical condition

consisting of office furnishing, the comfort of working, etc. The physical environment of the
organization positively influences employees – they feel physically safe working there.

Organizational Structure. It refers to how an organization is structured, and how different

roles, responsibilities, and duties are divided. A sound organizational structure clearly defines the
how-to functions freeing employees’ from roles conflicts and achieving greater efficiency.

Leadership Styles. Today managers are leaders also. Being a manager he should have to
influence and encourage his employees for better performance. In an encouraging working
environment, employees tend to stay longer and reduce turnover.

Reward System. It is agreed that individual behavior is goal-directed. Employees feel

motivated, stay longer, and contribute their best effort in an organization that has a fair pay
system.

PERSONALITY: The term personality is derived from the Latin word “Persona” meaning to

speak through. An individual’s personality is the combination of traits and patterns that influence

their behavior, thought, motivation, and emotion. It drives individuals to consistently think, feel,

and behave in specific ways; in essence, it is what makes each individual unique. Over time,

these patterns strongly influence personal expectations, perceptions, values, and attitudes. In

addition to this, personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent
throughout life. It is a pattern of stable states and characteristics of a person that influence his or

her behavior toward goal achievement. Each person has unique ways of projecting these states.

TYPES OF PERSONALITY:

• Type A: Perfectionist, impatient, competitive, work-obsessed, achievement-oriented,

aggressive, stressed
• Type B: Low stress, even-tempered, flexible, creative, adaptable to change, patient,
tendency to procrastinate
• Type C: Highly conscientious, perfectionist, struggles to reveal emotions (positive and
negative)
 • Type D: Worrying, sad, irritable, pessimistic, negative self-talk, avoidance of social
situations, lack of self-confidence, fear of rejection, appears gloomy, hopeless.

PERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS: Personal effectiveness means getting the best out of

yourself. It is an approach to success in which all energy, skills and motivation are used to
achieve goals and develop as a person. Individuals with strong personal effectiveness tend to
strive to achieve more, advance their careers, and grow both professionally and personally.

7 BASIC PERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS SKILLS:

1. Determination: It allows you to focus only on achieving a specific goal without being
distracted by less important things or spontaneous desires. It may be developed with the help
of self-discipline exercise.

2. Self-confidence:
It appears in the process of personal development, as a result of getting aware of yourself, your
actions and their consequences. Self-confidence is manifested in speech, appearance, dressing,
gait, and physical condition. To develop it, you need to learn yourself and your capabilities, gain
a positive attitude and believe that by performing the right actions and achieving the right goals
you will certainly reach success.

3. Persistence:
It makes you keep moving forward regardless of emerging obstacles – problems, laziness, bad
emotional state, etc. It reduces the costs of overcoming obstacles. It can also be developed with
the help of self-discipline exercise.

4. Managing stress:
It helps combat stress that arises in daily life from the environment and other people. Stress
arises from the uncertainty in an unknown situation when a lack of information creates the risk of
negative consequences of your actions. It increases efficiency in the actively changing
environment. It requires problem-solving skills.

5. Problem-solving skills:
They help cope with the problems encountered with a lack of experience. It increases efficiency
by adopting new ways of achieving goals when obtaining a new experience.

6. Creativity:
It allows you to find extraordinary ways to carry out a specific action that no one has tried to use.
It can lead to a decrease or an increase of costs, but usually, the speed of action is greatly
increased when using creative tools. It requires the ability to generate ideas.

7. Generating ideas:
It helps you achieve goals using new, original, unconventional ideas. The idea is a mental image
of an object formed by the human mind, which can be changed before being implemented in the
real world. For generating ideas you can use a method of mental maps, which allows you to
materialize, visualize and scrutinize all your ideas, which in turn contributes to the emergence of
new ideas.

ATTITUDE: An attitude describes persons’ enduring favorable or unfavorable cognitive

evaluations, feelings, and action tendencies toward some object or idea. People have attitudes
regarding almost everything such as religion, politics, cloth, music, food.

A person’s attitudes settle into a coherent pattern and to change one may require difficult
adjustment in many others. Thus, a company would be well advised to fit its product into
existing attitudes rather than to try changing people’s attitude.

Attitude can be defined as learnt predispositions to respond to an object or class of objects in a

consistently favorable or unfavourable way.

TYPES OF ATTITUDE:
Job satisfaction: A collection of positive and/or negative feelings that an individual holds
toward his or her job.

A person will hold a positive attitude if had a high level of satisfaction, while dissatisfied people
will generally display a negative attitude towards life.

When we talk about attitude, we generally speak about job satisfaction because they are inter-
related in organizational behaviour.

Job involvement:
Job involvement refers to the degree to which a person identifies himself (psychologically) with
his job, actively participates and considers his perceived performance level important to self-
worth.
Higher job satisfaction leads to low absenteeism & employee turnover and indicates that the
individual cares for his job.

Organizational commitment:
Organizational commitment refers to a degree to which an employee identifies himself with the
organizational goals and wishes to maintain membership in the organization.

Resigning from the job or absenting versus job satisfaction is a predictor of organizational
commitment. Organizational commitment depends upon the degree of autonomy & freedom job
and job enrichment factor.

ABC MODEL OF ATTITUDE:

Affective component :The affective component of an attitude refers to the emotional
reactions or feelings an individual has towards an object, person, issue, or situation.
This component involves feelings or emotional responses like liking, disliking, love, hate, fear,
etc. It is essentially the emotional aspect of an attitude that can influence an individual’s
behavior. For example: “I am scared of spiders.”

Behavioral (or conative) component: The behavioral component of an attitude refers to

how one behaves or acts towards an object, person, issue, or situation based on their attitude. It
involves an individual’s tendency to behave in a certain way toward the attitude object. For
example: “I will avoid spiders and scream if I see one.”

Cognitive Component: The cognitive component of an attitude refers to the beliefs,

thoughts, and attributes that an individual associates with an object, person, issue, or situation. It
involves the mental processes of understanding and interpreting information.

For example: “I believe spiders are dangerous.”

ATTITUDE FORMATION & ATTITUDE CHANGE:

An attitude is a general and lasting positive or negative opinion or feeling about some person,
object, or issue. Attitude formation occurs through either direct experience or the persuasion of
others or the media. Attitudes have three foundations: affect or emotion, behavior, and
cognitions. In addition, evidence suggests that attitudes may develop out of psychological needs
(motivational foundations), social interactions (social foundations), and genetics (biological
foundations), although this last notion is new and controversial.

DETERMINANTS OF ATTITUDE FORMATION:

The determinants of attitude formation are given below:

1. Socialization
Socialization is a life-long process of learning through which an individual learns from
his parents, other family members, friends, peers, teachers, mass-media and anything in
the surrounding. This learning shapes an individual’s personality and overall perception
of things.
 2. Personal Experiences
Apart from learning from others, our personal interactions with others and experiences
with things shape our attitudes towards certain things. We form a positive attitude
towards a thing if we have a pleasant experience with it. Similarly, our bad experiences
lead to the formation of our negative attitude towards things.

ATTITUDE CHANGE: “Attitude change is defined as the process of alteration or

modification in the existing attitude towards an object”. Attitude change refers to a modification,
alteration, or shift in an individual's beliefs, feelings, evaluations, or behavioral tendencies
toward a particular object, person, group, issue, or situation. Attitudes are a combination of
cognitive, affective, and behavioral components, and a change in attitude can occur through
various processes.

TYPES OF ATTITUDE CHANGE:

1. Incongruent Attitude Change: It is a type of attitude change wherein the attitude changes
in the opposite direction to the existing attitude – e.g. a positive attitude becomes a negative
attitude, or a negative attitude becomes a positive attitude. For example, a vegetarian
person has a negative attitude towards beef consumption and avoids eating beef. If this
person at some point in life comes to know that beef is a good source of protein which
essential for health, he may develop a positive attitude towards beef consumption and start
eating it. This means the attitude changed in opposite direction such as a negative attitude
turned into a positive attitude. This type of attitude is called incongruent attitude change.

2. Congruent Attitude Change: It is a type of attitude change where the existing attitude
changes in the same direction. The existing attitude is further strengthened towards an
object – e.g., a positive attitude becomes more positive, and a negative attitude becomes
more negative.
For example, a person has a positive attitude towards gym exercises because he thinks it
would give a muscular shape to his body. If at some point in life, he realizes that in addition
to shaping the body, gym exercises have also general health benefits (such as that it is also
good for heart and brain health), his liking for gym exercise increases further and he starts
to give more time to gym exercises. Here the positive attitude became more positive. This
is called congruent attitude change.

GROUP BEHAVIOUR: Group behavior defines the way individuals are influenced by
the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others in a group. Groups can also influence
people's social behavior to fit in a particular group. This is known as group conformity. A
group can be defined as two or more interacting and interdependent individuals who come
together to achieve particular objectives. A group behavior can be stated as a course of
action a group takes as a family. For example − Strike.
Group behavior refers to the patterns of actions, interactions, and relationships that occur
within a social group. It involves the ways in which individuals within a group behave and
interact with each other, as well as how the group as a whole functions. Group behavior is
a complex phenomenon influenced by various factors, including individual characteristics,
group dynamics, social norms, and external environmental factors.
 TYPES OF GROUP BEHAVIOUR:
(1) Collective Behaviour: This includes social behaviour such as action and industrial action.
It is defined by the fact that individuals come together to express a preference for, or a
grievance against, a given social situation. Strikes by the Nigerian Labour Congress, for
instance, constitute collective behaviour or mass action.

(2) Community Services: These are actions taken by corporate groups or individuals to
improve the lots of communities. The provision of boreholes or pipe-borne water in a
community by a group of individuals is a form of community service. Usually, community
services are directed at areas of need and very often, they take the form of corporate social
responsibility or philanthropy.

INTERPERSONAL SKILLS: Interpersonal skills are often referred to as people skills,

social skills, or social intelligence. They involve reading the signals that others send and
interpreting them accurately in order to form effective responses. Individuals show their
interpersonal skills all the time simply by interacting with others.

BENEFITS OF INTERPERSONAL SKILLS:

1. Effective Communication:
• Interpersonal skills enhance communication abilities, enabling individuals to
express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings clearly and concisely.
• Good communication fosters understanding, reduces misunderstandings, and helps
build positive relationships.
2. Relationship Building:
• Strong interpersonal skills contribute to the development of positive and healthy
relationships, whether in the workplace, within a family, or in social settings.
• Building rapport and connecting with others helps create a supportive and
collaborative environment.
3. Conflict Resolution:
• Individuals with strong interpersonal skills are better equipped to manage and
resolve conflicts. They can navigate disagreements, find common ground, and
promote compromise.
• Conflict resolution skills are valuable in both professional and personal settings.
4. Teamwork and Collaboration:
• Interpersonal skills are essential for effective teamwork. Individuals who can
collaborate well with others contribute to a more productive and harmonious work
environment.
• Team members with good interpersonal skills are often better at sharing ideas,
cooperating, and achieving common goals.
5. Leadership Development:
• Effective leaders possess strong interpersonal skills. Leaders who can connect with
and inspire others are more likely to build trust and loyalty among their team
members.
 • Leadership often involves guiding and motivating individuals, and strong
interpersonal skills are key to achieving this.

TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS:

Transactional analysis is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social

interactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the communicator as a basis for
understanding behavior. In transactional analysis, the communicator is taught to alter the ego state
as a way to solve emotional problems.

In other words, a social psychological model that talks about the personal growth and personal
change, i.e., identifying the ego states of each individual to understand their behaviors and altering
them to solve the emotional problems.

BENEFITS OF TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS:

Improved Communication:

One of the most significant benefits of Transactional Analysis is its ability to enhance
communication skills. TA provides a clear model for understanding the different communication
styles and patterns people use in their interactions. By recognizing these patterns, individuals can
become more effective communicators.

Self-Awareness:

Transactional Analysis encourages self-awareness, allowing individuals to gain insight into their
own behavior and emotions. By understanding your ego states (Parent, Adult, and Child), you can
identify your emotional responses and thought patterns in various situations. This self-awareness
is a crucial first step towards personal growth and self-improvement.

Conflict Resolutional:

TA provides valuable tools for resolving conflicts. Through the analysis of transactions,
individuals can pinpoint where communication breakdowns occur and why they happen. This
knowledge empowers them to take steps to prevent conflicts or address them constructively when
they arise. TA helps individuals replace unproductive patterns with healthier communication
strategies, leading to smoother interactions and better relationships.

Improved Relationships:

By gaining insight into your own and others' ego states and transactional patterns, you can build
healthier and more fulfilling relationships. You'll be better equipped to empathize with others,
respond effectively to their needs, and establish more meaningful connections. Whether it's with
family, friends, or colleagues, TA can transform the way you relate to others, fostering trust and
intimacy.
Personal Growth:

Transactional Analysis serves as a powerful tool for personal growth and self-improvement. As
you become more aware of your ego states and how they influence your behavior, you can make
conscious choices to change and grow. This self-transformation can lead to increased self-
confidence, emotional intelligence, and a greater sense of personal fulfillment.

Stress Reduction:

Understanding the principles of Transactional Analysis can help reduce stress in various aspects
of life. By recognizing when you are engaging in negative or unproductive patterns of thinking
and behavior, you can take steps to manage stress more effectively. This can lead to improved
mental and emotional well-being.

Effective Leadership:

For those in leadership roles, Transactional Analysis can be an invaluable tool. It enables leaders
to better understand and motivate their team members, fostering a more productive and
harmonious work environment. By applying TA principles, leaders can lead with empathy,
communicate clearly, and resolve conflicts efficiently.

JOHARI WINDOW:

The Johari window model is used to enhance the individual’s perception on others. This model is
based on two ideas- trust can be acquired by revealing information about you to others and learning
yourselves from their feedbacks. Each person is represented by the Johari model through four
quadrants or window pane. Each four window panes signifies personal information, feelings,
motivation and whether that information is known or unknown to oneself or others in four
viewpoints.
The method of conveying and accepting feedback is interpreted in this model. A Johari is
represented as a common window with four panes. Two of these panes represent self and the
other two represent the part unknown to self but to others. The information transfers from one
pane to the other as the result of mutual trust which can be achieved through socializing and the
feedback got from other members of the group.

1.Open/self-area or arena – Here the information about the person his attitudes, behaviour,
emotions, feelings, skills and views will be known by the person as well as by others. This is
mainly the area where all the communications occur and the larger the arena becomes the more
effectual and dynamic the relationship will be. ‘Feedback solicitation’ is a process which occurs
by understanding and listening to the feedback from another person. Through this way the open
area can be increased horizontally decreasing the blind spot. The size of the arena can also be
increased downwards and thus by reducing the hidden and unknown areas through revealing
one’s feelings to other person.

2. Blind self or blind spot – Information about yourselves that others know in a group but you
will be unaware of it. Others may interpret yourselves differently than you expect. The blind spot
is reduced for an efficient communication through seeking feedback from others.

3. Hidden area or façade – Information that is known to you but will be kept unknown from
others. This can be any personal information which you feel reluctant to reveal. This includes
feelings, past experiences, fears, secrets etc. we keep some of our feelings and information as
private as it affects the relationships and thus the hidden area must be reduced by moving the
information to the open areas.

4. Unknown area – The Information which are unaware to yourselves as well as others. This
includes the information, feelings, capabilities, talents etc. This can be due to traumatic past
experiences or events which can be unknown for a lifetime. The person will be unaware till he
discovers his hidden qualities and capabilities or through observation of others. Open
communication is also an effective way to decrease the unknown area and thus to communicate
effectively.