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Social learning is a free form of learning based on interaction with and observation of the others. The decision to learn at work is taken if you think that there will be a positive outcome for you. You can imitate the others, act with the conviction that you can, and you can analyze yourself. These processes are:

Modeling - when you “borrow” somebody’s behavior. You will observe and remember the behavior. If you will be motivated by the possible results you will imitate under the condition that you have the ability to mimic that behavior.

Self-efficacy – when you think that you are capable of performing an action based on previous experience. This works better if your “feeling” is associated with persistence and is encouraged by the positive reactions of others.

Self-management - when your actions are determined by your beliefs. You set your standards and goals and you observe, judge and modify accordingly your behavior.

Social learning theory is not just for the scholars. You need to be aware of its processes as a base of your learning and self-development.

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Primacy effect – the first impression, quick to appear but it last long. It is the main people selection tool that you use everyday. Try not to judge employees or employers based on that. You will loose precious time to realize that either you hired somebody that is not good for the job, either you work for somebody you have no respect for and is using you in ways you do not appreciate.

Contrast effect – it is not important how good you, but how good are you next to the other members of your team. People around you influence the way you are perceived. In business is important because an organization will move as fast as the slowest of its employees.

Halo effect – is the long term effect of the primacy bias. If you got it right the first time, you will get away easier with future low performance.

Similar-to-me effect – is the clone effect. The decision maker will hire a person that he perceive as similar with himself. The fact that the decision maker is a high performer does not guarantee the new comer will be the same.

Reliance on Central Traits - you will notice first what is interesting for you. If somebody is too formal you will perceive him as somebody that is hard to talk to. If a person is physically attractive you will perceive him as better professional.

Stereotyping – is the tendency to include people in social categories (lawyers) and ignore other differentiation factors. People are not their profession … or at least this is what we like to believe about ourselves.

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A team justifies its existence only if it brings added value through numbers. That means if 1+1=3.

An employee has the tendency to ‘free-ride”. It is human nature.

Social loafing is an organizational behavior of an employee that makes less effort in a team compared with the way he behaves next to an individual task. The reason can be that he feels his contribution is not correctly evaluated, but what allows this behavior to happen is that the employee knows he is not evaluated.

There are a lot of preventive measures ranging from establishing individual accountability to peer evaluation or writing a team contract. The only question remains who will implement these measures? A functional manager will not have sufficient authority due to the fact that team members can be from different departments. The only approach that proves to be efficient is using a project manager or a team leader that has basic knowledge of organizational behavior.

The key to avoid social loafing seems to be not to develop the sense of community that is expected from a team member, but to define better the individual tasks of the respective employee. Being part of the team is motivating as long as “I am a member of this team” and not so much when “we are a team”.

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I have learned in time to treat a company as a living organism that is always sick. Rarely did I see a company that was healthy. And once in a blue moon I got a chance to exchange a few words with it.

Why? Because it was moving so fast!

A healthy business organizational structure accepts only change and business innovation as normality. This acceptance is called organizational development.

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Did you know that employees are not mindless robots, a resource that you can dispose of and quantify in a turnover rate statistics?

Of course you knew!

If you are an employer, you will tell it to the world … and do nothing about it.

… while there is nothing wrong with capitalism, there is something definitely mistaken if you do not understand that you lose money when your employees are not treated as your best clients. After all, they buy every day the worst merchandise there is: your desire of getting rich.

If you are an employee, you will tell it to your friends as an externalization of your frustrations at work.

… if you are not just hunting for a warm place to stay and get paid, you better stop complaining and start negotiating. Do not assume that you deserve anything. But be certain that you can negotiate anything.

Leader vs. Manager vs. Executive … one of these 3 terms does not belong here.

Which one? Leader! In business, leadership is a trait of a manager useful to exert formal authority in interacting with others. It is also a trait of the informal leaders, people that are managers of expertise.

Leadership is a concept to be discussed alone. There is no logical comparison between management and leadership because they are not opposite, but intertwined.

A manager is an administrator of people or knowledge. He takes care of people and the work environment and takes decision that must benefit those two. As long as a manager does not understand that he is not a boss with discretionary powers, he remains a stupid person, doing stupid things and abusing people.

An executive is a person that does things; he makes things happen by acting. From a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to an Account Executive, they are all people that execute action in order to reach organization’s objectives.

All the responsibilities in a job description can be grouped using the above two characteristics: administrator (manager) and executive (“action man”). When one takes precedence, it gives the name to that job: manager of “something” or a description of the main action that the respective employee must perform.

If we are to better define the manager component, we have to analyze it in comparison with the executive component of a job.

If we are to better define and understand leadership, we have to analyze its formal and informal components, the types of manifestation, and the followership trait (inside and outside the company).

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Going to work in the morning is related with happiness or at least a state of acceptance next to your job. You work 8 to 10 hours a day, you get paid, and then you get back to your life.

In the same time, job satisfaction is a necessary evil. Your existence is conditioned by the needs that you have and also the needs of those for which you are a provider. No matter how much we get, we want more. Is what drives us forward, being in the same time the root of our unhappiness.

No matter how much the organization does, in the end job satisfaction is a choice, an acceptance of your responsibilities with a reward that influences not if you go to work, but if you go to work at the same company next month.

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Individualism versus collectivism - refers to the degree that people favor their individual against group values.

Power distance – the extent to which people accept the inequality in the distribution of power in a society. The low power distance environment allows participation in the decision making process and most important direct access to your superior. In a high power distance environment is normal to manifest positive emotions to your superiors and negative emotions to your subordinates and everybody accepts this as normal. The last one  is definitely not my favorite.

Uncertainty avoidance – deals degree to which people tolerate or feel threatened ambiguity and uncertainty. Strong uncertainty avoidance means that change is dangerous. Weak uncertainty avoidance environments do not see hard work as virtue. As an individual choice, the truth should be somewhere in between these two.

Masculinity vs. Feminity – the distribution of roles between genders can determine the orientation of a society in the direction of assertiveness and materialism or to focus on human interaction and concern for others.

Long versus short-term orientation – Long-term orientation focuses on the future, on perseverance and persistence. Short-term orientation focuses on the past and present, on respect for tradition and fulfilling social obligations

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It seems that there are three specific personality characteristics that are important in the study of organizational behavior and influence the level of satisfaction of the employees: locus of control, self-esteem and self-monitoring.

Locus of control refers to what a person believes that has a good or bad influence about his/her life. More specific in a work environment: if the career path is influenced mostly by external factors or internal forces.

Weak people believe in fate, luck and powerful people that can help them on the way. It works if you accept to have your freedom and rights as a human being limited.
Strong people believe in themselves. Their future is determined by their career planning process, their actions and initiatives. These people ask not why you have money, but “how did you do it so I can do it too?”

Self-esteem is the result of self-evaluation. A favorable image about yourself can make you more resistant to external influences, consequently much more inclined to be perseverant and focused.

Self-monitoring is about self-control or how much of a show you put in interacting with others. There are jobs that require acting (from my personal experience, law is one of them) and there are natural actors that have the wrong job.

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