Exam 1 Study

Managers functions, roles and skills

• managers: individuals who achieve goals through other people

• managerial activities:

  • make decisions

  • allocate resources

  • direct activities of others to attain goals

• management functions:

  • planning: a process that includes defining goals, establishing strategy, and developing plans to coordinate activites

  • organizing: determining what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be grouped, who reports to whom, and where decisions are to be made

  • leading: a function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting the most effective communication channels, and resolving conflicts

  • controlling: monitoring activities to ensure they are being accomplished as planned and correcting any significant deviations

• Minztberg’s managerial roles

  • interpersonal

    • figurehead: symbolic head; required to perform a number of routine duties of a legal or social nature

    • leader: responsible for the motivation and direction of employees

    • liaison: maintains a network of outside contacts who provide favors and information

  • informational

    • monitor: recieves a wide variety of information; serves as nerve center of internal and external information of the organization

    • disseminator: transmits information received from outsiders or from other employees to members of the organization

    • spokesperson: transmits information to outsiders on organizations plans, policies, actions, and results; serves as expert on organizations industry

  • decisional

    • entrepreneur: searches organization and its environment for opportunities and initiates projects to bring about change

    • distrubance handler: responsible for corrective action when organization faces important, unexpected distrubances

    • resource allocator: makes or approves significant organizational decisions

    • negotiator: responsible for representing the organization at major negotiations

• technical skills: the abilitiy to apply specialized knowledge or expertise

• human skills: the ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people, both individually and in groups

• conceptual skills: the mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations

intuition

• intuition: gut feelings, individual observation and commonsense

contributing disciplines to the OB “psychology, social psychology, sociology, and anthropology”

• psychology: the science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other animals

• sociology: the study of people in relation to their fellow human beings

• social psychology: an area within psychology that blends concepts from psychology and sociology and that focuses on the influence of people on one another

• anthropology: the study of societies to learn about human beings and their activites

workplace diversity

• managing workforce diversity:

  • embracing diversity

  • changing US demographics

  • recognizing and responding to differences

• major workforce diversity categories

  • gender

  • disability

  • age

  • race

  • national origin

  • non-christian

  • domestic partners

model

• model: an abstraction of reality. a simplified representation of some real-world ohenomenon

• dependent variable: a response that is affected by an independent variable (what organizational behavior researchers try to understand)

  • productivity

  • absenteeism

  • turnover

  • deviant workplace behavior

  • organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)

  • job satisfaction

• independent variable: the presumed cause of some change in the dependent variable; major determinants of a dependent variable. the independent variable (x) can be at any of these three levels in this model:

  • individual

  • group

  • organizational system

surface level and deep level diversity

• surface- level diversity: differences in easily perceived characteristics, such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, or disability, that do not necessarily reflect te ways people think or feel but that may activiate certain stereotypes

• deep- level diversity: differences in values, personality, and work preferences that become progressively more important for determining similarity as people get to know one another better

forms of discrimination

(discriminatory policies or practicies, sexual harrasment, intimidation, mockery and insults, exclusion, incivility)