In an organization, employees bring different attitudes, values, perceptions, and stress. As individuals, we bring our own unique experiences and ideologies to the organizations. Organizations project an accepted value system and encourage employees to conform to the norms. Attitudes, values and emotions, perception, and stress are all important factors that influence organizational behavior. Our beliefs and feelings about something influence our attitudes about it. Our attitudes then affect our behavior through our intentions. The three most important job-related attitudes are job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and employee engagement. Job satisfaction reflects our attitudes and feelings about our job. Organizational commitment is the degree to which an employee identifies with the organization and its goals and wants to stay with the organization. Employee engagement reflects a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that an employee has for his or her job, organization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences the employee to apply additional discretionary effort to his or her work. There are many different kinds of values that can be held by people. Not surprisingly, then, it is somewhat common for an individual to have conflicting values. Values also differ across cultures in different parts of the globe. Emotions, affect, and mood are also important contributors to behavior. Emotions are intense, short-term physiological, behavioral, and psychological reactions to a specific object, person, or event that prepare us to respond to it. Mood, on the other hand, is a short-term emotional state not directed toward anything in particular. Affect represents our tendency to experience a particular mood or to react to things with certain emotions. Perception is the set of processes by which a person becomes aware of and interprets information about the environment. Basic perceptual processes include selective perception and stereotyping. The halo effect occurs when we form an overall impression about someone on the basis of a single (typically good) characteristic. The contrast effect happens when we evaluate someone by comparing that person to other people we have recently encountered who rank higher or lower on the same characteristics. We also project our own characteristics onto others who we perceive to be similar to us in some ways. Perception and attribution are also closely related. Internal attributions include ability and effort. External attributions include luck, not having sufficient resources, and the interference or help of other people. Distributive fairness is the perception of fairness of the outcome received. Procedural fairness is the fairness of the policies and procedures used to make the decision and determine the outcomes. Interpersonal fairness refers to the politeness, dignity, and respect with which people were treated during the decision-making process. Informational fairness focuses on the adequacy of the information and explanations received during the decision-making process. Trust is an outcome of fairness. Stress is an individuals response to a strong stimulus. Challenging events are stressful only when also accompanied by negative emotions. Some stress is actually beneficial. Functional stress is the experience of a manageable level of stress for a reasonable period of time that generates positive emotions including satisfaction, excitement, and enjoyment. Dysfunctional stress is an overload of stress from a situation of either under- or over-arousal that continues for too long.

***Please answer only two (2) discussion questions from the following list. Support your answers with information from peer-reviewed resources using APA Format for the citations and the references. Minimum of 150 words for each response.

1. If your boss was not sure it would be worth the investment to change the companys hiring practices to include an evaluation of applicants attitudes, what would you tell him or her?

2. Do you think that it would be easy to influence a subordinates attitudes, values, or emotions? Why? Which would have the largest influence on the employees behavior? Why?

3. What are the components of an individuals attitude? Relate each component to an attitude you currently have about something.

4. Do terminal or instrumental values have a larger influence on your behavior at work? Explain.

5. Think of a person you know who seems to have positive affectivity. Think of another who has more negative affectivity. How constant are they in their expressions of mood and attitude?

6. How does perception affect behavior? What stereotypes do you form about people? Are they good or bad?

7. Recall a situation in which you made attributions and describe them using the framework supplied in Figure 4.5.

8. Do you consider yourself a Type A or a Type B person? Why? Do you think a person who is a Type A can change to become more like a Type B? If so, how?

9. What are the major stressors for a student? What consequences are students most likely to suffer as a result of too much stress?

10. Do you agree that a certain degree of stress is necessary to induce high energy and motivation?