Psychology of management

coordinated activity 
skills
ensuring labor process. These skills are expressed in a concrete style of behavior, suppose 
certain group norms, status hierarchy, and social attitudes. 
Group norms
. A person in the sphere of self-evident notions and conventional norms 
feels oneself free from limitations as well. 
Status
, as well as a person’s position in a group, is a rigid phenomenon. A well-tuned 
collective has a distinct hierarchical structure in which every employee knows his/her place. A 
manager caring for favourable social-and psychological climate in the collective must analyze 
the personality and activity peculiarities of work group and form the status structure in such a 
way that it maximally corresponded the organization’s tasks on the one hand, and united the 
work group into a single complex with clearly fixed social roles and status positions. 
Personality status should be maintained: a top executive’s strict peremptory shout at a 
middle manager in the presence of employees reduces to nothing all the efforts to form a 
favourable social-and-psychological climate. 
The 
attitude
as readiness for action in a strictly defined way is acquired mainly through 
the following social-and-psychological mechanisms: imitating, contamination, convincing. In 
everyday life these mechanisms do not ever occur in their pure forms, but as a specific 
conglomerate supplemented and distorted with personality’s perceptions, aims, values, and work 
conditions. 

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German psychologists G. Hibsch and M. Vorwerg point out that while imitating people 
learn the ways of behaving and reacting without the use of any methods and modes of influence. 
In other words, imitating is spontaneous formation of an attitude. An apprentice in a shop 
“behaves” by his master’s example though (s)he does not get from his master any direct orders 
concerning bad or good behavior towards bosses or other employees. 
J. Lollard and N. Miller have established that there are four main groups of people 
causing an especially strong desire to imitate: 
1) people who are older; 
2) people exceeding one in social status; 
3) people exceeding one on the intellect level; 
4) people exceeding one in some practical skill. 
So, the desire to imitate is caused especially by the people who have mastered the ways 
of behavior readily accepted by the imitating person or even causing his/her excitement. And the 
desire to imitate is also directed at such kinds of reaction (and readiness for it) which needn’t 
necessarily be connected with the quality causing excitement. A duty of manager is to see to it if 
possible that identification should be positive, i.e. that newcomers should imitate professional 
and moral employees.