Organizational Behavior & Performance Flashcards

A company observes that high-performing teams have emerged in remote work conditions despite lower social cohesion. This BEST supports which concept?

Answer: Task cohesion can sustain performance even when social cohesion is low

Task cohesion (shared commitment to the team's goals) can maintain high performance even when social bonds are weaker, as research on virtual teams demonstrates.

When an employee avoids speaking up about a problem because no one else seems concerned, this phenomenon is BEST explained by:

Answer: Diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance

Pluralistic ignorance occurs when individuals privately doubt but assume others' silence indicates everything is fine, leading to collective inaction despite shared private concern.

Goal-setting theory predicts that performance is HIGHEST when goals are:

Answer: Specific and difficult, with commitment from the employee

Locke and Latham's goal-setting theory shows that specific, challenging goals (with employee commitment) produce the highest levels of performance.

An I-O psychologist conducts an organizational diagnosis and finds high voluntary turnover concentrated in one department. The MOST appropriate first analytic step is:

Answer: Analyze whether turnover is random or patterned by tenure, role, or demographics

Identifying patterns in who is leaving (by tenure, role, demographic) helps pinpoint root causes before intervening, ensuring diagnosis precedes prescription.

The concept of 'psychological contract breach' refers to:

Answer: An employee's perception that the organization failed to fulfill its implicit obligations

Psychological contract breach occurs when an employee perceives that the organization has failed to fulfill the unwritten, implied mutual obligations of the employment relationship.

In Kotter's 8-step change model, which step IMMEDIATELY follows 'creating a guiding coalition'?

Answer: Developing a vision and strategy

In Kotter's model, after forming a powerful coalition (step 2), the next step (step 3) is developing a clear vision and strategy to direct the change effort.

Which research design allows an I-O psychologist to make the STRONGEST causal inferences about the effect of a training program on employee performance?

Answer: Randomized controlled experiment with random assignment to training and control conditions

Random assignment to conditions controls for selection bias and confounding variables, allowing the strongest causal inference about the training program's effect.