Personnel Management and Organizational Behavior Essay

Four ways to shape employee behavior are: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, and extinction. Positive reinforcement is following a reaction with something enjoyable (Robbins & Judge, 2007). Employees need recognition for exceeding the organization’s standard on job performance. A well-organized reward program will motivate employees to excel the organization’s standard. Example of this are: employee of the month, quarter or year, and recognitions to employees for presenting ideas to improve the organization’s operation. Negative reinforcement is also referred as â€Å"looking busy†. Supervisors should explain the task to the employee, provide necessary resources, and ensure the work is performed to standard. These actions will help eliminate negative reinforcement. Punishment and knowing the organization’s standard are directly related. The organization’s standard, duties and responsibilities of the employees have to be established in order to hold employees accountable for their incorrect behavior. Punishment can be used as the way to unsure employees follows the standard. The different type of punishments have to be included in the workplace policy to ensure the employee knows what could happen if he/she does not follow the standard. Extinction is a behavior not reinforced, causing it to disappear (Robbins & Judge, 2007). Adequate supervision and communication in the workplace are two key elements to assess this behavior and eliminate when is not needed. Managers have to develop ways to shape employee’s behavior in order to improve performance. Shaping the employee’s behavior starts with adopting practice that encourage employees to be responsible, loyal, and committed to an organization’s goal (â€Å"Strategic Planning in the Payroll Department†, 2007). Some of these practices include setting standards, establishing duties and responsibilities, and direct supervision. Discuss the three components of an attitude. The main components of an attitude are: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. Cognitive component is a consciously held opinion or belief (Colborn, 2007, p. 68), such as â€Å"sexual harassment is wrong†. Managers should enforce values, high standard, group and cultural behavior awareness to improve the working environment. The affective component is the emotional tone or feeling of an attitude (Colborn, 2007): â€Å"I don’t like Charles, because he harasses his female employees†. Leaders should maintain open communication with their employees to let them express their feelings and emotions. Behavioral component is the intent to behave in a certain way toward something or someone (Robbins & Judge, 2007), such as â€Å"I’m going to avoid Charles because of his improper conduct†. This action could cause problems in the work group and if not handle properly it will set a bad example to the employees. In conclusion leaders should understand the components of an attitude in order to establish means to avoid these in the working environment. Enforcing values, high standards, open communication and continues supervising are key to success. How is bounded rationality related to decision making? Bounded rationality is defined as making decisions by constructing simplified models that extract the essential features from problems without capturing all their complexity (Robbins & Judge, 2007, p. 161). This concept used a method where a satisfactory solution is obtained in stade of the optimal solution. This approach is driven by previous experiences, limited information and selecting the first solution that satisfies the constraints. Decision-making process is a detail process to obtain the best solution. During this process all alternatives and courses of action are considered and evaluated completely. This approach consumes time and resources because every alternative has to be evaluated in order to obtain the best solution. In my opinion the decision-making process should be exercise as much as possible in order to obtain the optimum solution to a problem. Leaders should be aware of both approaches and select one based on time, safety concerns, priority of the task, and resources available. What is a quality circle? Quality circle is a work of employees and supervisors, who meet regularly to discuss their quality problems, investigate causes, recommend solutions, and take corrective actions (Robbins & Judge, 2007, p. 237). A successful quality circle should include the following: a comptroller, individual assignment, tentative times, progress report, implementation and performance monitoring. The comptroller will be in charge of conducting the meetings, keeping record of the problems, progress and implementation. Problems should be brainstorm by the group and assigned to the best qualify employee. Each problem should have a tentative time to obtain a solution. During each meeting a progress report is required in order to ensure timely solution of the problem. Implementing the solution and monitoring its performance will ensure employee’s satisfaction and develop credibility to the quality circle. The end statement of the quality circle is to fix problems in the organization.