Case Study Of External Locus Of Control

Description
Penny, a friend and indirect co-worker to the group, is the Systems Librarian at the Sunshine University Engineering Library. Despite being a straight-A student, high school valedictorian, and a Phi Beta Kappa, she is struggling with the demands and interpersonal dynamics of her first job out of college. While she feels confident in her ability to manage the tasks inherent to her job description (technical support and training for new technology), she feels besieged by the expectations placed on her by her manager, Sheldon. She believes Sheldon is a poor steward of the department’s finances as he acquires new technology for the library with abandon. In her view, Sheldon’s lack of restraint creates additional, unnecessary work
for Penny. Consequently, she feels Sheldon expects her to work night and day to keep up with the volume of work he is creating.
In an attempt to manage all of the work on her plate and the nearly constant interruptions of emails, meetings, and technical support requests, Penny has started to come in early and work through her lunches. In fact, she has started to utilize the lunch hour to provide mandatory training for her co-workers as she can not seem to schedule these meetings at any other time. While she has been praised for putting in the extra hours, Penny has received some negative feedback regarding her approach to teamwork. She fears change and is now convinced her job is on the line if she is unable to rectify the situation. Despite the mounting stress and acrimonious working relationships, Penny cares about the library and wants to see it succeed. With nowhere else to turn, she has come to the group looking for guidance on how to save her sanity and her job.
To aid in the assessment, the group was provided with a first-hand account of the work environment at the SSU Engineering Library from Penny herself. She discussed, at length, the responsibilities of her role, the relationship she has with Sheldon, and her feelings about her colleagues. She also provided the group with an overview of a typical day in the office. In a brief follow-up conversation, Penny provided some additional details around her schedule, the types of meetings she was sked to attend, and her ideal purchasing strategies for the library. In addition, a member of the group was able to consult with two of Penny’s immediate co-workers, Len and Bernie, to offer supplementary information on the working conditions in Penny’s department.
Diagnosis
The group’s initial, unscientific assessment of Penny was that her attitude, which is unequivocally terrible, is at the center of the problems she is facing. Regardless of the outside factors at play, Penny admitted to suffering from a lack of motivation and general feeling of helplessness. If she is to continue working at SSU, she will need to find ways to adopt a more positive outlook. The need for Penny to adjust her attitude goes beyond just wanting Penny to be more pleasant to deal with. Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Reasoned Actions explains how attitudes and behavior are related. Their model illustrates how beliefs influence attitudes. In turn, attitude directly affect intentions, and intentions are what drives behavior. Thus, a negative attitude precipitates negative behavior. In order to help Penny, address her attitude, the group needed to gain an understanding of the factors influencing her beliefs.
Based on Penny’s first-hand assessment of the obstacles she faces in her position at SSU, it is obvious that she possesses an external locus of control.
Locus of Control refers to the degree to which people feel they control their own lives. People with an internal locus of control believe their behavior and personal characteristics determine outcomes, whereas people with an external locus of control perceive outside factors like luck, fate, and other outside forces are controlling their lives (Yemen & Clawson). As externals tend to believe their lives are controlled by outside factors, they often experience higher levels of anxiety, stress, and job dissatisfaction than their internal counterparts. Penny’s external locus of control is evident in the way she characterizes Sheldon and how she describes the difficulties she experiences with consistent interruptions throughout the day. She is certain Sheldon is out to get her and is purposefully trying to overwhelm her with meaningless tasks. When asked to clarify why she think’s Sheldon expects her to work so much, she explained that he had never directly asked her to work more. Instead, she “intuited” the expectation. Furthermore, Penny classifies tech support requests, which are a key component of her job description, as interruptions from the “idiots and slackers” she works with rather than an important aspect of the role she plays within the department. These examples help to illustrate the way Penny views the
world around her. It is important to note that when it comes to locus of control, internal is not necessarily “good” and external is not always “bad.” However, understanding how Penny interprets the outcomes of the situations she is experiencing help in providing a suitable plan of action when overcoming her workplace complications.
Penny also displays the characteristics inherent to attributional biases. Attribution refers to the act of explaining something by indicating a cause (Attribution, 2018). Attributional biases come into play when an individual’s perception colors their interpretation of a situation’s cause. In particular, Penny has a bias related to her point of view. In a point-of-view-based bias, a situation’s contributors can be either an actor or an observer (Gordon, 2001). Actors, like Penny, view success as a credit to themselves personally while attributing failures to outside, situational causes. As a result, the actor is able to maintain their pre-existing self-image and ego. This behavior is evident in the way Penny describes her past accomplishments in school and her present failures at work. She thrived throughout her education and was sure to mention all of her accolades and accomplishments. Penny sees herself as smart and capable, so attributing her success in school to these personal characteristics enables her to maintain her self-image as a “good librarian.” On the other hand, when Penny receives negative feedback, like in her last performance evaluation, she attributes those failures to the people she works with as taking personal responsibility for her shortcomings would interfere with her preconceived self-perception.
Another factor influencing Penny’s behaviors relates to the way she perceives the world around her.
The process of perception takes place when someone organizes their sense of reality in a way that is meaningful to them (Gordon, 2001). Essentially, perception refers to a person’s interpretation of reality. Interpretations of a situation can vary, and purely objective perceptions are rare. People often suffer from distortions in perception that can skew their understanding of the world around them, thus contributing to poor decision making and missed opportunities. Penny primarily exhibits signs of the perceptual distortions through her use of stereotyping, self-fulfilling prophecy, and projection. Penny displays stereotyping, or making assumptions about a single person based on the group they belong to, in her assessment of her co-workers as “idiots and slackers.” She sees herself as the only person in the office who works hard and makes sacrifices. She is willing to work through her lunches, so she expects others to do the same. When her colleagues protest, she classifies them all as incompetent and lazy based solely on their desire to have a mid-day break. The effects of self-fulfilling prophecy are felt when a person’s expectations cause them to see behaviors whether or not those behaviors actually exist (Gordon, 2001). In Penny’s case, she thinks Sheldon buys new technology with no regard for the department’s budget, their existing materials, or her time. She
expects his purchases to be ill-conceived, so she will perceive his acquisitions as a waste of time and money regardless of the validity of the purchase. Finally, and perhaps most pronounced display of perceptual distortion, is the way Penny projects her own inadequacies on Sheldon and her other co-workers. Penny believes Sheldon expects her to work all the time, yet according to Len and Bernie, she’s the one placing expectations on her co-workers to give up their lunches for her training meetings. Similarly, she talks openly about how much she hates meetings and regards them as interruptions to her day; however, she holds frequent mandatory training sessions at inconvenient times. She describes staff requests for tech assistance as being “demanding” of her immediate attention, but Len and Bernie say she’s the one with control issues and an attitude that suggests nothing they can do will be good enough or fast enough to please her. Furthermore, Penny thinks Sheldon’s evaluation of her lack of people skills was “mean,” yet she actively tries to get him in trouble by accusing him of squandering the department’s funds in a meeting with University management.