Exam 5: Learning Concepts to Improve Performance: Part A

According to the Self Competency: Coming to Work Today?,on any given day,about 1,500 JCPenney Company employees do not show up for work at one of the company's more than 11,000 stores.

In the TV advertisements for AFLAC,the duck is the unconditioned stimulus and feeling good about ducks is the conditioned stimulus.

Salary,bonuses,and incentive plans are considered material rewards.

Learning is a temporary change in knowledge or observable behavior that results from practice or experience.

According to the Across Cultures Competency: Flowers: A Symbol of Love?,Americans see red when they are angry,but red is a lucky color for the Chinese.It is customary for the Chinese to put money in red envelopes as gifts for employees and children on special occasions.

A variable ratio schedule is effective because it creates uncertainty about when the consequence will occur.

Deliberately or not,reinforcement is always delivered according to some schedule.

A contingency of reinforcement consists of an antecedent,a behavior,and a consequence.

Most behaviors in organizations are influenced by secondary reinforcers.

In Teams Competency: Steelcase,Inc. ,the organization created reserved parking spaces for high-performing employees to motivate other employees.

Continuous schedules tend to foster more regular performance,because the reinforcer is delivered after every response,rather than only after a specific time interval.

The extinction procedure consists of three steps: (1)identifying the behavior to be reduced or eliminated (2)identifying the reinforcer that maintains the behavior,and (3)stopping the reinforcer.

A primary reinforcer is an event that a person knows is good.

Oral reprimand is the most common form of punishment in organizations.

The interval schedules generally lead to better performance than do ratio schedules,since they are more directly related to the occurrence of the desired behavior.

For the first two weeks at his new job,Harry was annoyed by how much his manager watched over his shoulder to make sure he was doing the job right.When he finally started performing well,he noticed that the manager was not watching any more.In this case,the manager used negative reinforcement to get a desired behavior from Harry.

In operant conditioning,a response is learned because the person has been conditioned to respond that way.

Negative reinforcement is the removal of all reinforcing events.

If leaders fail to reinforce desirable behaviors,they may be using extinction without recognizing it.As a result,the frequency of desirable behaviors may inadvertently decrease.

Individual piece-rate system used in many manufacturing plants is an example of a fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement.