This document provides an overview of key concepts in organizational behavior, including a focus on individual and group behavior. It discusses the goals of organizational behavior as explaining, predicting, and influencing behavior in areas like employee productivity, absenteeism, turnover, job satisfaction, and workplace misbehavior. It also covers topics like attitudes and job performance, including the components of attitudes and the relationship between job satisfaction, productivity, absenteeism, turnover, customer satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior, and workplace misbehavior. Additional sections discuss personality types, learning, perception, job involvement, organizational commitment, emotions, and managing generational differences and negative workplace behaviors.
3. Focus and Goals of Organizational Behavior
Focus of Organizational Behavior.
• OB looks at individual behavior.
• OB is concerned with group behavior
• OB looks at organizational aspects
Goals of Organizational Behavior.
The goals of OB are to explain, predict,
and influence behavior. Six important
ones have been identified: employee
productivity, absenteeism, turnover,
organizational citizenship behavior
(OCB), job satisfaction, and workplace
misbehavior.
Organizational as an iceberg
4. Attitude and job performance
ATTITUDES are evaluative statements -favorable or unfavorable- concerning
objects, people, or events. They reflect how an individual feels about something.
An attitude is made up of three components:
• Cognition component of an attitude refers to the beliefs, opinions,
knowledge, or information held by a person
• Affect component of an attitude is the emotional or feeling part of an
attitude. Using our example, this component would be reflected by the
statement,
• Behavior component of an attitude refers to an intention to behave in a
certain way toward someone or something
5. JOB SATISFACTION refers to a person’s general attitude toward his or her job. A person
with a high level of job satisfaction has a positive attitude towards his or her job. A person
who is dissatisfied has a negative attitude.
● How satisfied are employees?
The higher pay translates into higher job satisfaction. But, the higher pay reflects
different types of jobs. Higher-paying jobs generally require more advanced skills,
give jobholders greater responsibilities, are more stimulating and provide more
challenges, and allow workers more control.
● Satisfaction and productivity
organizations with more satisfied employees tend to be more effective than
organizations with fewer satisfied employees
● Satisfaction and absenteeism
Absenteeism can affect individual productivity. Simply put, if someone works less,
they're likely to be less productive. Employers should consider root causes, which
include burnout, disengagement, as well as those that may require
accommodations.
6. ● Satisfaction and turnover.
Research on the relationship between satisfaction and turnover is much stronger. Satisfied
employees have lower levels of turnover while dissatisfied employees have higher levels of
turnover.
● Job satisfaction and customer satisfaction.
In service organizations, customer retention and defection are highly dependent on how
frontline employees deal with customers. In service organizations, customer retention and
defection are highly dependent on how frontline employees deal with customers.
● Job satisfaction and ocb.
Job satisfaction should be a major determinant of an employee’s OCB. Satisfied employees
would seem more likely to talk positively about the organization, help others, and go above
and beyond normal job expectations. There is a modest overall relationship between job
satisfaction and OCB. But that relationship is tempered by perceptions of fairness.
● Job satisfaction and workplace misbehavior.
When employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, they’ll respond somehow. The problem
comes from the difficulty in predicting how they’ll respond. One person might quit. Another
might respond by using work time to play computer games. And another might verbally
abuse a coworker.
7. Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment
Job involvement is the degree to which an employee identifies with his or her job,
actively participates in it, and considers his or her job performance to be
important to his or her self-worth.29 Employees with a high level of job
involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work
they do.
Organizational commitment is the degree to which an employee identifies with
a particular organization and its goals and wishes to maintain membership
in that organization.31 Whereas job involvement is identifying with your job,
organizational commitment is identifying with your employing organization.
Employee Engagement Managers want their employees to be connected to,
satisfied with, and enthusiastic about their jobs. Disengaged employees
have essentially “checked out” and don’t care. They show up for work, but
have no energy or passion for it
8. Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment
Attitudes and Consistency people seek consistency among their attitudes and
between their attitudes and behavior. When they encounter an inconsistency,
individuals will do something to make it consistent by altering the attitudes,
altering the behavior, or rationalizing the inconsistency.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory postulates that an underlying psychological
tension is created when an individual's behavior is inconsistent with his or her
thoughts and beliefs. This underlying tension then motivates an individual to
make an attitude change that would produce consistency between thoughts
and behaviors.
Attitude Surveys Typically, attitude surveys present the employee with a set of
statements or questions eliciting how they feel about their jobs, work groups,
supervisors, or the organization. Ideally, the items will be designed to obtain the
specific information that managers desire.
Implications for Managers Managers should be interested in their employees’
attitudes because they influence behavior. Satisfied and committed employees.
9. PERSONALITY
An individual’s personality is a unique combination of emotional, thought, and
behavioral patterns that affect how a person reacts to situations and interacts
with others. Personality is most often described in terms of measurable traits that
a person exhibits. We’re interested in looking at personality because just like
attitudes, it too, affects how and why people behave the way they do
1. MBTI
One popular approach to classifying personality traits is the personality-
assessment instrument known as the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator).
On the basis of their answers, individuals are classified as exhibiting a preference
in four categories: extraversion or introversion (E or I), sensing or intuition (S or N),
thinking or feeling (T or F), and judging or perceiving (J or P). Combining these
preferences provides descriptions of 16 personality types, with every person
identified with one of the items in each of the four pairs
10. 2. The Big Five Model
The five personality traits in the Big Five Model are:
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Emotional stability
• Openness to experience
3. Additional Personality Insights
Locus of Control
Machiavellianism
Self-Esteem
Self-Monitoring
Risk-Taking
4. Other personality traits
PERSONALITY
11. Personality types in different cultures
There’s no personality type is common for a given country. National cultures
differ in terms of the degree to which people believe they control their
environment.
Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
Emotions are intense feelings that are directed at someone or something.
They’re object-specific; that is, emotions are reactions to an object. One area
of emotions research with interesting insights into personality is emotional
intelligence (EI), which is the ability to notice and to manage emotional cues
and information. It’s composed of five dimensions: Self-awareness, Self-
management, Self-motivation, Empathy, Social skills
Implication for manager
being a successful manager and accomplishing goals means working well
together with others both inside and outside the organization. In order to
work effectively together, you need to understand each other.
12. Perception
Factors That Influence Perception
A number of factors act to shape and sometimes distort perception.
These factors are in the perceiver, in the target being perceived, or in the
situation in which the perception occurs.
Attribution Theory
Attribution theory was developed to explain how we judge people
differently depending on what meaning we attribute to a given behavior.
Shortcuts Used in Judging Others
Perceiving and interpreting people’s behavior is a lot of work, so we use
shortcuts to make the task more manageable. These techniques can be
valuable when they let us make accurate interpretations quickly and
provide valid data for making predictions. However, they aren’t perfect.
Implications for Managers
Managers need to recognize that their employees react to perceptions,
not to reality.
13. Learning
Learning occurs all the time as we continuously learn from our experiences. A
workable definition of learning is any relatively permanent change in
behavior that occurs as a result of experience.
Operant Conditioning
Operant conditioning argues that behavior is a function of its
consequences. People learn to behave to get something they want or to
avoid something they don’t want. Operant behavior is voluntary or
learned behavior, not reflexive or unlearned behavior
Shaping: A Managerial Tool
Because learning takes place on the job as well as prior to it, managers
are concerned with how they can teach employees to behave in ways
that most benefit the organization. Thus, managers will often attempt to
“mold” individuals by guiding their learning in graduated steps, through a
method called shaping behavior.
14. Learning
Social Learning
Much of what we have learned comes from watching others (models)—
parents, teachers, peers, television and movie actors, managers, and so
forth. This view that we can learn both through observation and direct
experience is called social learning theory. The amount of influence that
these models have on an individual is determined by four processes:
1. Attentional processes.
2. Retention processes.
3. Motor reproduction processes.
4. Reinforcement processes
Implications for Manager
Employees are going to learn on the job. The only issue is whether
managers are going to manage their learning through the rewards they
allocate and the examples they set, or allow it to occur haphazardly.
15. Temporary Issues in Organizational Behavior
Managing Generational Differences
Generational differences in the workplace are plentiful, ranging from differences
in beliefs to differences in working styles and more. Additionally, today's
workplace is incredibly diverse generationally, generations working together:
Gen Y, Gen Z, Millennials, etc. However, manager should have to recognize and
understand the behaviors of this group in order to create an environment in
which work can be accomplished efficiently, effectively, and without disruptive
conflict.
Managing Negative Behavior in the Workplace
Pretending that negative behavior doesn’t exist or ignoring such misbehaviors
will only confuse employees about what is expected and acceptable behavior.
Preventing negative behaviors by carefully screening potential employees for
certain personality traits and responding immediately and decisively to
unacceptable negative behaviors can go a long way toward managing negative
workplace behaviors. But it’s also important to pay attention to employee
attitudes, because negativity will show up there as well.