OB at work chapter 1 ( book notes)

What is Organizational Behavior (OB)?

  • Organizational behavior is about understanding factors at the individual, group, and/or organizational level that help or hinder individual and organizational interactions and effectiveness.

  • Individual differences influence group interactions and perceptions of organizations.

The Power of People: The Case of Cayuga Collection

  • The Cayuga Collection demonstrates how an organization can positively impact its employees, customers, and the community.

  • Founded in 1999 by Hans Pfister and Andrea Bonilla, specializing in luxury vacation properties with sustainable practices.

  • Operates in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama with over 400 staff members.

  • Focuses on properties with no more than 50 rooms.

  • Protects over 1,500 acres of rainforest, showing a commitment to sustainability.

  • The company’s success is attributed to its people.

  • They realized that without “buy in” from staff and the local communities, their sustainability efforts would not be effective.

  • Created the Cayuga Innovation Contest to tap into the collective knowledge of their 400+ staff members, resulting in 65 actionable innovative ideas.

  • The Cayuga Collection has garnered worldwide acclaim and won awards such as the World Saver Award from Condé Nast Traveler and the Tourism for Tomorrow Award from The World Travel & Tourism Council.

  • Seeks to positively influence local communities and surrounding ecosystems through buying local, using refillable glass containers, and banning single-use plastics.

Understanding Organizational Behavior

  • Importance of people at work in making workplaces exciting, fun, and productive.

  • Steve Jobs attributed Apple's innovations to its people, leadership, and management.

  • Mary Kay Ash emphasized that people are a company's greatest asset.

  • Individuals need tools to be lifelong learners due to frequent job changes.

  • This book provides vocabulary, frameworks, and critical-thinking skills to diagnose situations and act ethically.

  • Diverse organizations such as General Motors, SpaceX, NASA, REI, and Brew Dr. Kombucha are considered.

  • People are the common denominator in how work is accomplished.

What Is Organizational Behavior?

  • Organizational Behavior (OB): The systematic study and application of knowledge about how individuals and groups act within the organizations where they work.

  • OB draws from psychology, sociology, economics, political sciences, and medical science.

Levels of Analysis in OB

  • Individual: Understanding an individual's personality.

  • Group: How a manager’s personality affects a team.

  • Organization: How an organization’s culture affects performance.

Why Organizational Behavior Matters

  • Helps individuals become more engaged organizational members.

  • Addresses important topics such as getting along with others, lowering stress, and making effective decisions.

  • Employers care about OB topics, as highlighted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).

  • Research shows that successful organizations provide employment security, engage in selective hiring, utilize self-managed teams, and share information.

  • Companies that value their employees are more profitable.

  • Healthy and effective organizations focus on role clarity, information sharing, and performance feedback.

  • Many organizations do not have healthy work cultures.

Adding to Your OB Toolbox

  • OB Toolbox features offer tools for use now and in the future.

  • Focuses on skill development and personal growth.

OB Toolbox: Skill Survival Kit

  • Know yourself: Identify talents and weaknesses.

  • Keep your skills fresh: Revolutionize your portfolio every six years.

  • Master something: Excel in a specific skill.

  • Embrace ambiguity: View change as an opportunity.

  • Be authentic: Be genuine.

  • Network: Build connections.

  • Don’t over- (or under-) sell yourself: Share successes without overdoing it.

  • Appreciate new technology: Stay updated on new technologies.

  • Education enhances interactions and increases value to organizations.

  • Those with a bachelor’s degree make 67% more than those with a high school degree.

Is OB Just Common Sense?

  • OB is not just common sense, it involves systematic study and application of knowledge.

  • Systematic approach rules out alternative explanations.

Learning and Retention

  • Learning: A relatively permanent change in knowledge or skill produced by experience.

  • Factors affecting learning: learner characteristics, environment, and context.

  • Retention: The ability to recall or recognize what has been learned over time.

  • Retention is more effective when information is presented using visual and oral modes.

  • Learning outcomes are strongly related to motivation and mental ability.

Memory

  • Memory: The ability to retain and recall information.

  • Short-term memories last seconds or hours.

  • Long-term memories last months and years.

  • Chunking, repetition, meaning, motivation, and learning techniques enhance retention.

Chunking

  • Chunking: The process of taking single pieces of information and grouping them into larger units.

  • Facilitates efficient encoding, retention, and recall.

Repetition

  • Repetition: Reviewing information over time is more effective for retention.

  • Studying over time is more effective than cramming.

  • Overlearning: Continued studying and practice after initial proficiency has been achieved.

Meaning and Motivation

  • Learners invest more effort when they find learning meaningful.

  • Motivation enhances learning.

Learning Style Preferences

  • Visual Learners: Prefer to learn by seeing information.

  • Auditory Learners: Prefer to learn by listening.

  • Kinesthetic (Tactile) Learners: Prefer to learn by doing and trial and error.

  • Adapting to different learning situations is beneficial.

Techniques for Students

  • Effective Notetaking: Use longhand notes to process and reframe information.

  • Quizzing: Test knowledge through self-quizzes and flashcards.

  • Internships and Practicums: Gain hands-on experience.

Organizational Behavior Research Methods

Research Concepts, Tools, and Approaches

  • Hypotheses: Tentative guesses or hunches for an expected observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested.

  • Variables: Entities that can take on different values.

Case Studies

  • Case studies: In-depth descriptions of a single industry or company.

  • Benefits: Provide rich information for drawing conclusions.

  • Downside: Difficulty generalizing results.

Field Studies

  • Field studies: Research conducted in actual organizations.

  • Involve surveying employees and managers.

  • Experimental design: A study having a group that receives a treatment and a comparison group that receives no treatment.

  • Control group: A group that does not receive any experimental manipulation so it can be compared to a treatment group.

  • Treatment group: A group that receives experimental manipulation.

Laboratory Studies

  • Lab study: Research conducted under controlled conditions, usually following an experimental design.

  • Provides control over the environment but lacks realism.

  • Useful for examining basic research questions.

Machine Learning

  • Machine learning: Algorithms generate models based on available data and continue to update and adjust as new information is available.

Meta-Analysis

  • Meta-analysis: The process of summarizing research findings from studies on related topics.

  • Provides a more definitive answer than a single study.

Surveys

  • Surveys: Research tools used to elicit respondents’ reactions to specific questions.

  • Can be open-ended or close-ended.

Measurement Issues in OB

  • Reliability: The consistency of measurement.

  • Validity: The degree to which a measure captures what it intends to measure.

  • Correlations: Measures the strength of the relationship between two variables.

  • Causation: The act of making something happen.

  • Correlation does not equal causation.

  • Datum: The term that refers to a single observation.

  • Data: The term used to describe multiple observations and is always plural (as if you were using the word numbers).

Big Data

  • Big data: The volume, variety, velocity, and veracity, or validity, of data.

Analytics

  • Descriptive analytics: Approaches focused on understanding what has already happened.

  • Predictive analytics: What is likely to happen based on what we already know.

  • Prescriptive analytics: A focus on what should be done in the future based on what we know.

Trends Influencing Organizational Behavior

Challenges and Opportunities

Ethical Challenges

  • Business ethics: When ethical principles are applied to situations that arise at work.

  • Ethical scandals in the business world.

  • Sarbanes-Oxley Act: Consists of 11 specific requirements aimed at greater accountability, which companies must comply with in terms of financial reporting.

  • Importance of ethical culture and leadership.

Online Data Privacy Concerns

  • Data privacy: Individuals’ control over the collection, storage, access, and reporting of their own personal data.

  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): States that for all of the EU’s 500 million citizens, they have the right to have their data “forgotten” and purged from online records.

Lack of Employee Engagement

  • Employee engagement: The degree to which employees are fully involved in and enthusiastic about their work.

Technology and Automation

  • Dependence on technology and automation accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • Moore’s Law: Computing power doubles every two years.

  • More than 3.8 billion email accounts worldwide.

Uneven Information Quality

  • The Trust Project: Seeks to identify indicators of trust for information.

Sustainability and Green Business Practices

  • Triple bottom line: Evaluating organizations against three performance criteria, including economic, social, and environmental viability.

  • Sustainable business practices: Practices that meet the current needs of businesses without compromising the needs of future generations.

Aging Workforce

  • Aging American workforce.

Virtual Marketplace for Staffing

  • Gig economy: The prevalence of temporary employment positions where individuals are independent contractors rather than employees of organizations.

  • Outsourcing: An organization asking an outside organization to perform functions that could have been performed by itself.

  • Offshoring: Refers to some or all of a business process being moved from one country to another country.

Employee Engagement in Organizational Change Toward B Corp Status: The Case of Brew Dr. Kombucha and Tea

  • Brew Dr. Kombucha and Tea, formerly known as Townshend’s Tea Company, was founded in 2006 with the vision of creating a tea culture in the United States.

  • In 2008, the company began producing kombucha (a beverage made out of fermented sweet tea) under the brand Brew Dr. Kombucha.

  • B Corps are for-profit companies that are certified by the nonprofit B Lab if they meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency;

  • Many of these companies are small- to medium-sized organizations, which is where much of the growth in this type of company has emerged.