Exam 3: Perceiving Ourselves and Others in Organizations

NuGas Corp.has just sent a dozen (mostly white male)managers from Germany to its exploration site in a remote area of Indonesia.Few of these managers have worked with Indonesian employees,so the company has asked you to design an on-site one-day experiential training program to help these managers to minimize perceptual problems that might otherwise occur.The program must be experiential (i.e.participants interact with each other rather than attend an awareness lecture)and the activities must help the managers to discover biases that may be hidden or unknown to them.Describe the key features of this training program and discuss its conceptual foundations.

Jim has just arrived late for work.This is the third time over the past five days that he has arrived more than 30 minutes late.However,you conclude that Jim's lateness is due to factors beyond his control because most other employees who also take Jim's route to work have also been late to work on these days.According to attribution theory,what attribution have you made of Jim's lateness and based on what attribution rule?

A salesperson gets one sales order for every six clients called,on average.If a sales order is a form of positive reinforcement,what type of reinforcement schedule exists here?

Reflecting and experimentation are two steps in the experiential learning process.

Seeing a trend in a sequence of sales figures involves the process of categorical thinking.

Which of these statements about organizational learning is FALSE?

Which of the following is/are acquired mainly through observation and experience?

Self-serving bias is associated with which perceptual process?

Self-fulfilling prophecy occurs whenever supervisors accurately predict the future performance of recently hired employees.

One of the quickest ways organizations can acquire knowledge is by hiring knowledgeable employees and firing incompetent or uneducated staff.

The A-B-C model of behaviour modification helps us to:

Self-fulfilling prophecy may result in either better or worse performance than if the employee is not exposed to the self-fulfilling prophecy effect.

Behaviour modification does NOT consider:

Fundamental attribution error would cause a supervisor to believe that an employee's lateness is due to factors beyond the employee's control rather than to a lack of motivation to attend work.

What corrective action should the organization take to minimize this attribution error?

Stereotyping is a natural process that helps us to economize mental effort.

How do values and attitudes affect the selective attention process?

Co-workers no longer praise you when you engage in dangerous pranks,so you stop engaging in these pranks.This is an example of:

The tendency to attribute the behaviour of other people to internal factors more than external factors refers to:

One problem with stereotyping is that few traits assigned to a particular social category accurately describe every person identified with that group.