Importance of interpersonal skills

• “Soft skills” (e.g. team working, communicating effectively, leadership and cultural awareness)

  • Essential for managerial effectiveness

  • Likely to make workplace more pleasant

  • Nice working environment generate superior financial performance

What managers do (functions, roles, skills)

• Manager: individual who achieves goals through other people

  • Make decisions, allocate resources and direct activities to others to attain goals

• Organization: consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two or more people, that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals.

• Management functions

  • Planning: defining goals, establishing strategy and developing plans to coordinate activities.

  • 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: motivating employees, directing others, selecting most effective communication channels and resolving conflicts.

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

• Management roles

  • Interpersonal roles:

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

    • Leadership → responsible for the motivation and direction of employees

    • Liaison → maintains a network of outside contacts who provide favors and information

  • Informational roles:

    • Monitor → receives a wide variety of information; serves as nerve centre 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 organization’s plans, policies, actions and results; serves as expert on organization’s industry

  • Decisional roles:

    • Entrepreneur → searches organization and its environment for opportunities and initiates projects to bring about change

    • Disturbance handler → responsible for corrective action when organization faces important, unexpected disturbances

    • Resource allocator → makes or approves significant organizational decisions

    • Negotiator → responsible for representing the organization at major negotiations

• Management skills

  • Technical: ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise

  • Human: ability to work with and understand and motivate other people, individually and in groups

  • Conceptual: mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations

Enter organizational behavior

• Organizational behavior (OB): field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization's effectiveness.

Complementing intuition with systematic study

• Systematic study: looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects and drawing conclusions from scientific evidence

• Evidence-based management (EBM): basing managerial decisions on the best available scientific evidence

• Intuition: gut feeling not necessarily supported by research

Disciplines that contribute to the OB field

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

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

• Sociology: study of people in relation to their social environment or culture

• Anthropology: study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities

Few absolutes in OB

• Contingency variables: situational factors: variables that moderate the relationship between two or more variables

Challenges and opportunities for OB

• Responding to economic pressures

  • When times are bad, managers are front line

  • Bad times → stress, decision-making, coping

  • Good times → understanding how to reward, satisfy and retain employees

• Responding to globalization

  • The world has become a global village and managers must be ready for their job to change

    • Increased foreign assignments

    • Working with people from different cultures

    • Overseeing movements of jobs to countries with low cost labour

    • Adapting to differing cultural and regulatory norms

• Managing workforce diversity

  • Workforce diversity: organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation

• Improving customer service

  • Create customer responsive culture

• Improving people skills

  • Designing motivating jobs, techniques to improve listening skills and create more effective means

• Working in networked organizations

  • Managers need to develop new skills since motivating and leading people has to be done online, which is quite different

• Enhancing employee well-being at work

  • Helping employees get away from work when they need to (disconnect during vacation)

• Creating a positive work environment

  • Positive organizational scholarship: area of OB research concerning how to develop human strength, foster vitality and resilience, and unlock potential

• Improving ethical behavior

  • Ethical dilemmas and ethical choices: situations in which individuals are required to define right and wrong conduct

Coming attractions: developing an OB model

• Model: abstraction of reality, a simplified representation of some real world phenomenon

• Inputs: variables like personality, group structure, and organizational culture that lead to processes

• Processes: actions that individuals, groups, and organizations engage in as a result of inputs and that lead to certain outcomes

• Outcomes: key factors that are affected by some other variables

  • Attitudes: evaluations employees make about objects, people or events

  • Stress: unpleasant psychology process that occurs in response to environmental pressures

  • Task performance: combination of effectiveness and efficiency at doing your core job tasks

  • Citizenship behavior: discretionary behavior that contributes to the psychological and social environment of the workplace

  • Withdrawal behavior: set of actions employees take to separate themselves from the organization

  • Group cohesion: extent to which members of a group support and validate one another while at work

  • Group functioning: quantity and quality of a work group’s output

  • Productivity: combination of the effectiveness and efficiency of an organization

    • Effectiveness: degree to which an organization meets the needs of its clientele or customers

    • Efficiency: degree to which an organization can achieve its ends at a low cost

  • Organizational survival: degree to which an organization is able to exist and grow over the long term