Chapter 1 - What is organizational behavior? 

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

  <br /> <br /> </p>

\