2. Chapter Study Questions
What is organizational behavior and why is it
important?
What are organizations like as work settings?
What is the nature of management and
leadership in organizations?
How do we learn about organizational
behavior?
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3. What is organizational behavior and why is
it important?
Organizational behavior
Study of human behavior in organizations.
An interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding
individual and group behavior, interpersonal processes,
and organizational dynamics.
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4. What is organizational behavior and why is
it important?
Scientific methods models
Simplified views of reality that attempt to identify major factors and
forces underlying real-world phenomena.
Link presumed causes of events (independent variables) with
outcomes (dependent variables).
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6. What is organizational behavior and why is
it important?
Scientific thinking is important to OB:
The process of data collection is controlled and systematic.
Proposed explanations are carefully tested.
Only explanations that can be rigorously verified are accepted.
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7. What is organizational behavior and why is
it important?
Contingency thinking
Seeks ways to meet the needs of different management situations.
Recognizes responses to solutions must be crafted to best fit the
circumstances and people involved.
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8. What is organizational behavior and why is it
important?
Evidenced-based management
Uses hard facts and empirical evidence to make decisions.
Evidence-based thinking manifests itself through a contingency
approach which researchers identify how different situations can best
be understood and handled.
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9. What is organizational behavior and why is it
important?
Modern workplace trends
Commitment to ethical behavior.
Broader views of leadership.
Emphasis in human capital and teamwork.
Demise of command-and-control.
Influence of technology.
Respect for new workforce expectations.
Changing concept of careers.
Concern for sustainability.
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10. What are organizations like as work
settings?
Organization
A collection of people working together to achieve a common
purpose.
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11. What are organizations like as work
settings?
Organizational culture
A shared set of beliefs and values within an organization.
According to Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO,
it is the “character” of the organization.
Organizational “fit” matches organizational
culture and individual characteristics.
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12. What are organizations like as work
settings?
Organizational climate
Represents shared perceptions of members regarding what the
organization is like in terms of formal and informal management
policies and practices.
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13. What are organizations like as work
settings
Open systems
Obtain resource inputs from the environment and transform human
and material resource inputs into finished goods or services.
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15. What are organizations like a work setting?
Value Chain
Sequence of activities that results in the creation of good and services
of value to customers.
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16. What are organizations like as work
settings?
Stakeholders
People, groups, and institutions that are affected by and thus have an
interest or “stake” in an organization’s performance.
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17. What are organizations like as work
settings?
Workforce diversity
Presence of Individual differences based on gender, race and
ethnicity, age, able-bodiedness, and sexual orientation.
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18. What are organizations like as work
settings?
Multiculturalism
Refers to pluralism and respect for diversity in the
workplace.
Inclusion
The degree to which an organization's culture respects
and values diversity.
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19. What is the nature of management and
leadership in organizations?
Manager
Someone whose job it is to directly support the work
efforts of others.
Effective manager
Helps others achieve high levels of both
performance and satisfactions..
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20. What is the nature of management and
leadership in organizations?
Task performance
Quality and quantity of the work produced or
the services provided by an individual, team,
or work unit, or organization as a whole.
Job satisfaction
Indicates how people feel about their work
and the work setting.
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21. What is the nature of management and
leadership in organizations?
The management process.
Planning
Organizing
Leading
Controlling
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24. What is the nature of management and
leadership in organizations?
Managerial skills and competencies
Skill
An ability to translate knowledge into action that results in a desired
performance.
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25. What is the nature of management and
leadership in organizations?
Technical skill
› Ability to perform specialized tasks.
Human skill
› Ability to work well with other people.
Conceptual skill
› Ability to analyze and solve complex problems..
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26. What is the nature of management and
leadership in organizations?
Emotional intelligence
› Ability to understand and manage emotions both personally and in relationships
with others.
Self-awareness
Self-regulation
Motivation
Empathy
Social skill
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27. What is the nature of management and
leadership in organizations?
Ethical Management – includes ethics in decision-making.
Immoral manager
Amoral manager
Moral manager
Practices ethics mindfulness.
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28. Figure 1.5 Moral Leadership, ethics mindfulness,
and the virtuous shift
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29. How do we learn about organizational
behavior?
Learning
An enduring change in behavior that results from experience.
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30. How do we learn about organizational
behavior?
Life-long learning
Continuous learning from day-to-day experiences.
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OB is a scholarly discipline devoted to scientific understanding of individuals and groups in organizations and of the performance implications of organizational processes, systems, and structures.
It is also a science, because it uses scientific research methods. It draws its knowledge base from a variety of the behavioral and social sciences. These include psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and economics. OB integrates and applies this knowledge to real world problems.
The ultimate goal of OB is to improve the performance of people, groups, and organizations, and to improve the quality of work life overall.
OB scholars often propose and test through scientific methods models. They use these models to study theories of human behavior in organizations.
Common scientific research methods in organizational behavior.
The science of OB focuses on applications that can make a real difference in how organizations and people in them perform.
Although it is relatively easy to conclude that what works well in one culture may not work as well in another, it is much harder to specify exactly how cultural differences affect things like motivation, job satisfaction, leadership style, negotiating tendencies, and ethical behavior.
Fortunately, OB now rich with empirically based insights into cross cultural issues.
The environment of change in which we now live and work calls for lots of learning and continuous attention. The field of OB recognizes these trends in what people expect and value in terms of human behavior in organizations.
This definition describes everything from clubs, voluntary organizations, and religious bodies, to entities such as small and large businesses, schools, hospitals, and government agencies.
Organizational cultures influence the way we feel and act in organizations. In cultures that are more authoritarian and hierarchical, people are hesitant to make decisions and take action on their own, so they tend to show little initiative and wait for approval.
In other cultures, people can be extremely competitive and aggressive in the quest for performance results and rewards.
And, still other cultures are know for their emphasis on speed and agility in dealing with markets and environments, and in generating new ideas and innovations.
As for organizational fit, people who find a good fit tend to experience confidence and satisfaction in their work. Those who find themselves in a bad fit may be more prone to withdraw, experience work stress, and even become angry and aggressive due to dissatisfaction.
In some organizational climates, relations among managers and employees are relaxed and informal, with lots of free-flowing communication. In other climates, managers act distant from employees and emphasize formal work procedures and interactions, with more structured and restricted communication.
If everything works right, suppliers value the organization as their customer and continue to provide needed resources, employees value their work and infuse the transformation processes with their energies and intellects, and customers and clients value the organization’s outputs enough to create a continuing demand for them.
Organizations are open systems that create value while interacting with their environments. This cycle is called a value chain.
Begins with the acquisition of inputs continues through their transformation into product outputs, and ends when customers and clients are well served. When the value chain is well managed, the organization is able to sustain operations and, hopefully, prosper over the long run. When the value chain breaks down due to input problems, transformation problems, or output problems, an organization’s performance suffers and its livelihood may be may be threatened.
It is common in OB to recognize customers, owners, employees, suppliers, regulators, local communities, and future generation among the key stakeholders of organizations.
Consultant R. Roosevelt Thomas makes the point positive organizational cultures tap the talents, ideas, and creative potential of all members.
Multiculturalism is an attribute of organizations. It emphasizes pluralism, and genuine respect for diversity and individual differences.
A key element in any organization that embraces multiculturalism is inclusivity – the degree to which the culture embraces diversity and is open to anyone who can perform a job, regardless of their diversity attributes.
Being a manager is a unique challenge with responsibilities that link closely with the field of organizational behavior. At the heart of the matter managers help other people get important things done in timely, high-quality, and personally satisfying ways.
In today’s work environment, this is accomplished more through helping and supporting than through traditional notions of directing and controlling. The word manager is increasingly being replaced by in conversations by such terms as coordinator, coach or team leader.
The definition of an effective manager focuses attention on two key outcomes, or dependent variables that are important to OB. They are task performance and job satisfaction.
Managers should be held accountable for both results.
Task performance speaks for itself. Taking care of job satisfaction today can be considered an investment in tomorrow’s performance potential.
Planning – defining goals, setting specific performance objectives, and identifying the actions needed to achieve them.
Organizing – creating work structures and systems, and arranging resources to accomplish the goals and objectives.
Leading – instilling enthusiasm by communicating with others, motivating them to work hard, and maintaining good interpersonal relations.
Controlling – ensuring that things go well by monitoring performance and taking corrective action as necessary.
The management process of planning , organizing, leading and controlling
Based on Henry Mintzberg’s classic study on the ten key roles of effective managers.
Robert Katz divides the essential managerial skills into three categories: technical, human, and conceptual.The relative importance of these skills varies across the different levels of management.
Technical skill is an ability to perform specialized tasks using knowledge or expertise gained from education or experience.
Human skills are central to all aspects of managerial work and team leadership. A person with good human skills have a high degree of self-awareness and a capacity for understanding or empathizing with the feelings of others. People with this skill are able to interact well with others, engage in persuasive communications and deal successfully with disagreements and conflicts.
In addition to technical and human skills managers should be able to view the organization or situation as a whole so that problems are always solved for the benefit of everyone concerned. Conceptual skills involve the ability to see and understand how systems work and how their parts are interrelated, including human dynamics. Conceptual skill is used to identify problems and opportunities, gather and interpret relevant information and make good problem-solving decisions.
Self-awareness – ability to understand your moods and emotions.
Self-regulation – ability to think before acting and control bad impulses.
Motivation – ability to work hard and persevere.
Empathy – ability to understand the emotions of others.
Social skill – ability to gain rapport with others and build good relationships.
Human skills in emotional intelligence and interpersonal relationships are essential to managerial success in managerial activities and roles. Managers and team leaders need to develop, maintain, and work well with a variety of people, both inside and outside the organization. This can be done through task networks, social networks or career networks. This, in turn, helps with building social capital.
Social capital is a capacity to get things done due to relationships with other people.
An immoral manager chooses to behave unethically. She or he doesn’t subscribe to any ethical principles. An opportunity may be exploited for purely personal or business gain (i.e. Bernard Madoff).
The amoral manager acts unethically at times but does so unintentionally. The manager fails to consider the ethics of a decision or behavior.
The moral manager incorporates ethics principles and goals into his or her personal behavior. Ethical behavior is a goal, a standard, and even a matter of routine; ethical reasoning is part of every decision, not just an occasional afterthought.
Ethics mindfulness is an enriched awareness that causes one to behave with an ethical consciousness from one decision or behavioral event to another.
Moral leadership, ethics mindfulness, and the virtuous shift. Taken from Strategic Leadership of Ethical Behavior in Businesses.
Today’s knowledge-based world places a great premium on learning. Learners will have the ability to keep pace and succeed in a high-tech, global, and constantly changing environment.
Experience is found in work events and activities, conversations with colleagues and friends, counseling and advice provided by mentors, success models, training seminars and workshops, and other daily opportunities.
Life-long learning will in many respects be a key to personal and career success.
Figure shows how the content and activities of the typical OB course can fit together in an experiential learning cycle.
Experiential learning cycle: Experience > Reflection > Theory > Practice.
