ZENITH UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
PHILIPS ELVIS UGOCHUKWU
ZUC/BBA/BIST/0111/0027
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR MID SEMESTER EXAMINATION 1i. According to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality, personality is composed of three elements. These three elements of personality- known as the id, the ego and the superego- work together to describe the behavior of the manager. The Id which is inborn and biological in nature knows what is neither right nor wrong but is only concerned with whether an experience is painful or pleasant. The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state anxiety or tension. In the case of the manager, an increase in the want for alcohol or cigarette would produce an immediate attempt to drink or smoke. However, immediately satisfying this need is not always realistic. The manager, probably ruled entirely by the pleasure principle, might also find himself trying so hard to satisfy his cravings of alcohol and cigarette. This sort of behavior tends to be disruptive and morally unacceptable. Freud organized his personality theory around the psychosexual stages of development- oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. He states that a person’s experience at each stage leave some characteristic impressions and imprints that influence his future personality development. The focus on a person's libidinal energy in any form of over-indulgence or deprivation may remain fixed at an earlier stage of development in what Freud referred to as fixation. Thus, it could be concluded that the manager who drinks and smokes excessively was during his psychosexual development, fixed/fixated- by deprivation or over indulgence, on the oral stage. ii. Reinforcement theory of learning is said to be that which if a desired response yields a good effect, the behavior is tend to be repeated but if it yields an undesirable effect, it tends to be stopped. Principles of reinforcement includes- shaping, extinction, spontaneous recovery and concepts of reinforcement.
Shaping being a procedure of selective reinforcement is used to bring desired behavior to the manager. This principle is used when the target behavior- habit of not working under the influence of alcohol and nicotine, does not yet exist. Thus, what is reinforced is some approximation of the target behavior. Therefore, if the manager elicits any behavior that is closer to the desired behavior- first step could be emptying his fridge of alcoholic contents, he should be reinforced. If a new approximation does occur- next step could be to empty his stash of cigarettes, he should be reinforced. If a new approximation doesn’t occur, his previous approximation should be reinforced. If an approximation is repeated and reinforced three times, reinforcement can be withheld the next time that behavior appears. The new behavior we want the manager to build may be a series or chain of behaviors. A behavior chain is a series of related behaviors, each of which provides the cue for the next and the last that produces a reinforcer. Thus, almost everything the manager does to clean himself up can be considered part of a behavior chain.
Scheduling is a procedure of reinforcing a behavior either continuously or intermittently. In continuous reinforcement, the manager is provided reinforcement each time he makes a correct response. In intermittent or partial reinforcement, the manager is provided reinforcement on only some of the occasions on which the response occurs and this falls into two categories: ratio or interval. In a ratio schedule, reinforcement happens after a certain number of responses. In an interval schedule, reinforcement happens after a particular time interval. In a fixed-ratio schedule, reinforcement happens after a set number of responses. In the manager’s case, he could be reinforced only when he doesn’t smoke or drink after being stressed. In a variable-ratio schedule, reinforcement happens after a particular average number of responses. The number of responses the manager needs to elicit before being presented with reinforcement is unknown and thus he needs to continue behaving towards the desired behavior to be reinforced. In a fixed-interval schedule, reinforcement happens after a set amount of time, such as when the manager would be reinforced every evening. In a variable-interval schedule, reinforcement happens after a particular average amount of time. Here, when the manager’s reinforcement will be presented is unknown and varies across time. Experimental evidences show that after a prolonged training on the VI schedule, the manager will develop a steady rate of responding because he doesn’t know when reinforcement will come.

2. Groupthink is conformity in thought and behavior among members of a group, especially an unthinking acceptance of majority opinions. The human resource team of an organization can reduce groupthink by following the procedures viz: * when the team is evaluating alternatives, it should occasionally break into sub teams with different leaders and then reconvene to compare judgments * when the team is evaluating alternatives, at least one member of the team should be assigned the role of devil’s advocate to challenge the majority position * one or more outside experts should be invited during team meetings to challenge the views expressed by team members * when a vital policy decision must be made, more than one decision team should be assigned to work on it, each with a different leader * when asking a team to make decision, the leader or the other person assigning the task should avoid making bias comments that might influence the team in their deliberation, such as indicating a preference for a particular solution * the team leader should encourage each member of the group to express any doubts and objections, including criticisms on the leader’s judgment * when the human resource team is composed of persons from a different department, the leaders should encourage members to periodically get the reaction of their own staff and co-workers concerning what the group is doing and to report to the group any relevant information, ideas and criticisms * whenever a decision involves rival teams or competitors, adequate time should be set aside to allow the team to carefully consider the intentions and likely reactions of these parties * after reaching a preliminary consensus regarding the best alternative, the team should hold a second chance meeting to allow the members reconsider the evidence and express any lingering doubts before making a final decision

3. Power is the ability, strength and capacity to do something. It could be said that some people or leaders of an organization personalize and exercise power for their own needs rather than that of the organization or team they represent and may consequently engage in actions which have adverse outcomes for the organization. Such personalized power can be exploitative, non-egalitarian, and self-aggrandizing.
Individuals or leaders that exercise such power are typically authoritarian and narcissistic. Their goals reflect their own interests, while the needs of the organization and its members are manipulated in order to achieve their interests. The relationship between the leader and organizational members can be exploitative. The relationship is focused on followers’ personalized identification with the leader. It is likely to generate feelings of empowerment for the leader but, eventually, detrimental consequences for followers. Exercising power for personal gain demonstrates little regard for legitimate channels of authority. Such leaders are likely to pursue courses of action that enhance their own power within an organization and that attract credit to their achievements.
Personalized need for power is not tempered by responsibility or activity inhibition and produces coercive and controlling leadership behaviors. The attainment of such power acts as the goal for the leader. The attained power is used for self-aggrandizement and possibly to the detriment of the organization and its members. Leaders who exercise power for personal gains are likely to be willing to use people as tools or objects for achieving such gain. Their lack of empathy for others can allow them to see actions that result in harm to others as a legitimate path to goal achievement. Uninhibited willingness to use others for personal gain can eventually produce strong negative outcomes for the organization.
Exercising power for personal gain, negative life themes, and narcissistic tendencies of such leaders can contribute to a view of the world where personal safety is achieved through the domination and depersonalization of others. In the absence of self-regulatory mechanisms such as guilt, moral standards, and controlled by impulse inhibitors, destructive behaviors can result.

4. Knowledge management is the organization of intellectual resources and information systems within a business environment. Learning organizations effectively acquire, create and transfer knowledge across the company and modify their activities to reflect new knowledge and insights. Young executives could acquire these knowledge- explicit (easily communicated qualified and systematic) and/or tacit (more akin to wisdom, understood but rarely described). Managed properly, this knowledge could be used to the benefit of the organization. The following approaches could be adopted to manage the knowledge acquired by young executives:

The first approach is to collect and share their explicit knowledge, largely through the use of sophisticated information systems technology. Explicit knowledge may include intellectual properties such as patents and licenses, work processes such as policies and procedures, information on customers, markets, suppliers or competitors, competitive intelligence reports, benchmark data and so on. When an organization adopts this approach, the focus is on collecting and codifying knowledge and storing it in databases where it can easily be accessed and reused by anyone in the organization. Knowledge is gathered from young executives who possess it and is organized into documents that others can access and reuse. Mechanisms that can be used in this approach include: * data warehousing and mining: procedure where the company combine all their data into huge databases for easy access and data mining helps users make sense of the data by searching for patterns that can help solve organizational problems * knowledge mapping: this mechanism helps to identify where knowledge is located in the organization and how to access it * electronic libraries: with this mechanism, databases for specific type of uses are made available throughout the organization.

The second approach focuses on leveraging individual expertise and know how tacit knowledge by connecting people face to face or through interactive media. Tacit knowledge includes professional know-how, individual insights and creativity, personal experience and intuition. With this approach, senior managers concentrate on developing personal networks that links the young managers together for the sharing of tacit knowledge. Although information is used, it primarily supports and facilitates conversations and person-to-person sharing tacit knowledge. Mechanisms that can be used for this approach includes: dialogue, learning histories or storytelling and communities of practice.
But research has shown that if an organization is able to combine both types of knowledge, they will make a breakthrough.