Chapter 1

Organizational behaviour - the study of individual and group dynamics (microorganizational behaviour/psychology) in an organizational setting + the nature of the organizations themselves (macroorganizational behaviour/sociology).

  • Additionally, it draws on theories from psychology, sociology, economics, political science, anthropology and management.

  • Individuals matter: what they do matters how effective/happy/profitable a workplace is.

  • Evidence matters as this field is generally scientific.

  • Organization - social invention (group of people) that accomplishes common goals through group effort.

  • Management - the functional unit that coordinates the rest of the organization, they get things accomplished through others.

  • Human resources management - programs, practices, and systems to acquire, develop, motivate, and retain employees in organizations.

    • Human capital - the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) embodied in an organization’s employees.

    • Social capital - the social resources that individuals obtain from participation in a social structure.

  • Resource theory - valuing people in an organization can create good people, which are cinsidered rare.

    • The job someone does cannot be copied; small daily activities, socially complex resources (groups of people together creating things that only occur within groups).

  • The goals of organizational behaviour:

    • Predicting behaviours of others with a scientific foundation.

    • Explaining events in organizations.

      • Determining why people are more or less engaged, motivted, satisfied, or prone to resign.

    • Creating more profit by treating employees better; making them feel more valuable.

      • 1/8th rule- only 50% of CEOs believe that people matter, 50% of those actually make large scale changes, another 50% will actually persist long enough to see an outcome.

    • Management

      • Evidence-based management - translating principles based on the best scientific evidence into organizational practices.

        • Managers making decisions based on the best available science.

      • Meaningful work - satisfying and fulfilling to the individual and serving a wider cause or giving sense of belonging to a broader group. Four potential sources:

        • Work tasks

        • Roles (status)

        • Interactions

        • Organization (meeting values)

        • How organizations manage meaningfulness (4 sources):

          • Job design (enhancing skill variety)

          • Human resource practices (recruitment selection and training).

          • Leadership styles

          • Culture and values (community)

Management

  • Early prescriptions of management (2)

    • Classical viewpoint - advocates a very high degree of specialization of labour and a very high degree of coordination, each department tends to its own affairs, with few workers except for lower-level jobs.

      • Frederick Taylor - Father of scientific management which advocated careful research to standardize workers movements and breaks for maximum efficiency

      • Bureaucracy - the ideal job model according to Max Weber containing the following trait:

        • strict chain of commands where everone has one superior

        • criteria for selection and promotion based on technical skills

        • detailed rules, regulations and procedures to ensure the job gets done

        • use of strict specialization to match duties with technical competence

        • centralization of power on top.

    • Human relations movement - called attention to the dysfunctional aspects of classical management and bureaucracy to advocate more people-oriented styles of management to cater more to the social and psychological needs of employees.

      • Hawthorne studies - 1920’s and 1930s, studies conducted at the Hawthorne plant that were concerned with the impact of fatigue rest and lighting for productivity.

        • Researchers noticed that there were psychological and social processes on productivity and work, there was resisyance to management through group mechanisms.

        • Some specific problems of bureaucracy:

          • Strict specialization limits human growth and achievement

          • Strong centralization and reliance on formal authority fail to take advantage of the creative ideas and knowledge of lower-level members.

          • Strict, impersonal rules lead members to adopt the minimum acceptable level of performance.

          • Strong specializaation causes employees to lose sight of the overall goals of the organization.

    • Contingency approach - recognizes that there is no one best way to manage, appropriate styles depend on the demands of the situation.

    Mintzberg’s managerial roles (3):

    • Informational - concerned with the different ways managers receive and transmit information.

      • Monitor - (scanning the internal and external environments to follow performance and keep themselves informed of ideas and trends.

      • Disseminator - managers send information on facts and preferences to others.

      • Spokesperson - sending messages into the organizations external environment.

    • Interpersonal - expected behavioours to establish and maintain interpersonal relations.

      • Figurehead - managers serving as symbolds versus active decision makers.

      • Leadership - managers select, mentor, reward and discipline employees.

      • Liaison - managers maintain horizontal contacts in and out of the organization.

    • Decision

      • Entrepreneur - managers turn problems and opportunities into plans.

      • Disturbance handler - managers deal with problems stemming from employee conflicts and address threats.

      • Resource allocation - managers decide how to deploy time, money, personal, etc.

      • Negotiator - managers conduct major negotiations with the other organizations or individuals.

    • Managerial activities (4)

      • Routine communication - formal sending and receiving of information + paperwork.

      • Traditional management - planning, decision making and controlling.

      • Networking - interacting with people outside of the organization and informal soccializing.

      • Human resouce management - motivating, punishing, conflict, staffing + training.

    • John Kotter Managerial Agendas - found that managers can be grouped with 3 categories: agenda setting, netowrking and agenda implementation.

      • Agenda setting - informal and unwritten, concerned with people issues.

      • Networking - formal and informal network relevent to agendas.

      • Agenda implementation - used the networks to implement their agendas

  • Contemporary management concerns

    • Diversity

      • Increase in culturally diverse workforce.

      • New programs, flexible benefits.

      • Globalization

    • Employee Health and Well-Being

      • Increasing concerns over job security, poor job designs = high absentee rates.

      • Mental illness costing billions of dollars in lost productivity and absenteeism.

        • 3 organizational approaches to create positive work environments:

          • Mindfulness - a state in which people are highly aware of and attentive to what is happening in the present.

          • Workplace spirituality - provides employees with meaning, purpose and a sense of community.

            • Organizational care - values and principles centred on fulfilling employees’ needs, promoting employees’ best interests and valuing employees’ contributions.

          • Positive organizational behaviour (POB) - the study and application for positively oriented human resource strengths and psychological apacities that can be measured, developed and effectively managed for performance improvement in today’s workplace.

            • Psychological capital (PsyCap) - an individuals positive psychological state of development that is characterized by self-efficacy, optimism, hope and resilience.

              • Self-efficacy - one’s confidence to take on and put in the necessary effort to succeed at challending tasks.

              • Optimism - attributional style that involves explaining positive events in terms of personal and permanent causes and negative events in terms of external and situation-specific causes.

              • Hope - perservering towards life goals.

              • Resiliance - ability to bounce back from adversity

  • Talent management - an organization’s processes and practices to attract, develop, retain and deploy people with required skills.

  • Work engagement - a positive work-related state of mind characterized by vigour, dedication and absorption.

  • Alternative work arrangements

    • Precarious work - work that is risky, uncertain and unpredictable for workers.

  • Corporate social responsibility - an organization taking responsability for the impact of its decisions and actions on its stakeholders.

    • External: aimed at local community, environment and consumers.

    • Internal: focused on internal workforce.

The changing nature of work

  • Technology:

    • PROS

      • Created more efficient work

      • Different work styles, hybrid work and different skills

      • Increase in automation: replacing people with machines especially in the creation stages of products.

      • Outsourcing - organizations sending secondary tasks outwards/offshoring.

    • CONS

      • Stress, anxiety, concerns with AI

  • Employee-organization relationships:

Hypothesis - formal statement of expected relationship between two variables

Variables - measures that can have 2 or more values

  • Independent variable - a predictor or cause of variation in a dependent varibale.

  • Dependent variable - a variable that will vary with changes in the independent variable.

  • Concepts - The idea of a relationship between variables.

  • Operationalizations - The act of taking concepts and making them into something concrete and measureable.

  • Moderating variable - variable that affects the strength of the relationship between an independent and a dependent variable

    • Ex. country of origin, gender.

  • Mediating variable - intervenes or explains the relationship between an independent and dependent variable.

    • Ex. presence of a certain variable

  • Reliability - an index of consistency of a research subject’s responses.

  • Validity - an index of the extent to which a measure reflects what it is supposed to measure.

    • Convergent validity - where there is a strong relationship between different measures of the same variable.

    • Discriminant validity - a weak relationship between measures of different variables.

Observational research - research examining the natural activities of people in an oragnized setting by listening to what they say and watching what they do.

  • Participant observation - the researcher becomes a functioning member of the organizational unit.

  • Direct observation - the researcher observes organizational behaviour without participation in the activity being observed.

    • Research process:

      • Research question > form hypothesis > design a study > collect data > analyze data and report findings > evidence-based management

Correlational research - measuring variables precisely and examining relationships among these variables without changing the research setting.

  • Correlational design - passive observational data, observing the naturally occuring relationship with two variables.

    • Surveys, interviews, existing datas.

    • Scatter plot

    • Range from -1 to 1

      • Correlation of 1.0 is a concise line, .5 is moderate amount of scatter, .2 more scatter.

    • Results look like: x is related to y, x and y are associated/x and y change together.

      • In contrast, causal relationships usually are x leads to y, x predicts y.

      • Correlations do not equal causation.

    • Spurious correlation - if you measure enough things, they can covary by chance.

      • Ex. chicken consumption and total US crude oil imports.

      • There often exists a third variable that increases both of the variables.

  • Cross-sectional design - when the independent and dependent variables are measured at the same time.

  • Longitudinal design - the independent varibale is measured at one point and the dependent at a later point.

Expirimental research - manipulating nature; a variable is manipulated or changed under controlled conditions.

  • Researcher is taking control of the cause; manipulates the cause (IV) the consquence (DV) of the manipulation for some other variable is measured.

  • 2 essential features:

    • Manipulation of the independent variable

    • Random assignment to condition

      • Has a purpose of overcoming the third variable problem by distributing all other variables equally among the experimental groups.

      • Makes the groups equivalent to rule out the possibility that other factors can cause both of the factors to correlate.

    • Random assignment - of participants to experimental and control conditions, improves internal validity.

      • Internal validity - the extent a researcher can be confident that changes in a dependent variable are due to the independent variable.

        • Higher in experimental research.

        • Threats to internal validity - factors that are alternative explanations for the results of an expiriment.

      • External validity - the extent to which results generalize beyond current sample, setting, etc.

        • Higher in correlational research.

  • Control group - a group of research participants who have not been exposed to the experimental treatment.

  • Quasi-expirimental design - when partifipants cannot be randomly assigned, and variables are measured that they might differ on and then compared on those variables to control for any differences.

Three issues and concerns in organizational behaviour research

  • Sampling

    • Generalizing results beyond their study

    • External validity - the extent to which the results of a study generalize to other samples and settings.

    • Random sampling - research participants are reandomly chosen from the population of interest.

  • Hawthorne effects

    • The favourable response of participants in an organizational expiriment to a factor other than the independent variable that is being manipulated.

  • Ethics

    • Researchers must avoid unecessary deception, inform participants of the general purpose of the research, and protect anonymity of research participants.