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Summary Essentials of Organizational Behavior. 13th global edition. ISBN 13: 978-1-292-09007-8
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Essentials of Organizational Behavior. 13th global edition. ISBN 13: 978-1-292-09007-8
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Management & Organisation Y2Q2 IBMS
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Book: Stephen P. Robbins & Timothy A. Judge - Essentials of Organizational Behavior, Summary Y2Q2
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Book: Stephen P. Robbins & Timothy A. Judge - Essentials of Organizational Behavior, Summary Q1
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Essentials of Organizational BehaviorChapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior?
THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERPERSONAL SKILLS
Incorporating OB principles into the workplace can yield many important organizational outcomes.
For one, companies known as good places to work have been found to generate superior financial
performance. Second, developing managers´ interpersonal skills helps organizations attract and keep
high-performing employees, which is important since outstanding employees are always in short
supply and are costly to replace. Third, there are strong associations between the quality of
workplace relationships and employee satisfaction, stress, and turnover. Finally it can foster social
responsibility awareness.
ENTER ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Organizational behavior is a field of study that investigates the impact individuals, groups, and
structure have on behavior within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward
improving an organization’s effectiveness. It is a study of what people do in an organization and how
their behavior affects the organization’s performance. It emphasizes behavior as related to concerns
such as jobs, work, absenteeism, employment turnover, productivity, human performance, and
management.
COMPLEMENTING INTUTION WITH SYSTEMATIC STUDY
Behavior is not random, we can identify fundamental consistencies underlying the behavior of all
individuals and modify them to reflect individual differences. The fundamental consistencies allow
predictability.
When we use the term systematic study, we may looking at relationships, attempting to attribute
causes and effects, and basing our conclusions on scientific evidence – that is, on data gathered
under controlled conditions, and measured and interpreted in a rigorous manner.
Evidence-based management (EBM) complements systematic study by basing managerial decisions
on the best available scientific evidence.
Big Data
Big data is applied to making effective decisions and managing human resources. Companies,
nowadays, can track the shop behavior of consumers. This enabled them to create more targeted
marketing strategies than ever before. The challenge is to identify which statistics are persistent,
giving relatively constant outcomes over time, and predictive, showing steady causality between
certain inputs and outputs. Then they developed algorithms with that information.
A manager who uses data to define objectives, develop theories of causality, and test those theories
can determine which employee activities are relevant to the objects.
DISCIPLINES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE OB FIELD
Organizational behavior is an applied behavioral science built on contributions from a number of
behavioral disciplines, mainly psychology and social psychology, sociology, and anthropology:
- Psychology: seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other
animals.
- Social Psychology: considered a branch of psychology, blends concepts from both psychology and
sociology to focus on peoples’ influence on one another. One major study area is change – how to
implement it and how to reduce barriers to its acceptance.
,- Sociology: studies people in relation to their social environment or culture. They contributed to OB
through their study of group behavior in organizations.
- Anthropology: the study of societies to learn about human begins and their activities. They work on
cultures and environments has helped us understand differences in fundamental values, attitudes,
and behavior between people in different countries and within different organizations.
THERE ARE FEW ABSOLUTES IN OB
OB concepts must reflect situational, or contingency, conditions. We can say x leads to y, but only
under conditions specified in z – the contingency variables.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB
Today´s challenges bring opportunities for managers to use OB concepts. Some of the most critical
issues confronting managers for which OB offers solutions – or at least meaningful insights toward
solutions:
Responding to Economic Pressures
When times are bad like they were during the recession, managers are on the front lines with
employees who must be fired, who are asked to make do with less, and who worry about their
futures.
Managing employees well when times are good can be just as hard, if not harder, than when times
are bad. In good times, understanding how to reward, satisfy, and retain employees is at a premium.
In bad times, issues like stress, decision making, and coping come to the fore.
Responding to Globalization
The world has become a global village. In the process, the manager’s job has changed. Effective
managers will anticipate and adapt their approaches to the global issues we discuss next:
- Increased foreign assignments: as a manager you will often be transferred to another country. To be
effective, you will need to understand everything you can about your new location’s culture and
workforce before introducing alternate practices.
- Working with people from different cultures: to work effectively with people from different cultures,
you need to understand how their culture, geography, and religion have shaped them and how to
adapt your management style to their differences.
- Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labor: managers face the difficult task of
balancing the interests of their organizations with their responsibilities to the communities in which
they operate.
- Adapting to different cultural and regulatory norms: to be successful, managers need to know the
cultural norms of the workforce in each country where they do business. There will be country and
local regulations to consider, too. Managers also need to be cognizant of differences in regulations for
competitors in that country.
Managing Workforce Diversity
The concept that organizations are becoming more heterogenous in terms of gender, age, race,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, and inclusion of other diverse groups.
Workforce diversity acknowledges a workforce of women and men, many racial and ethnic groups,
individuals with a variety of physical or psychological abilities, and people who differ in age and sexual
orientation. It gives great opportunities but also challenging questions for managers and employees
in all countries.
Improving Customer Service
OB can help managers increase the success of interaction with customers by showing how employee
attitudes and behavior influence customer satisfaction.
,Improving People Skills
You’ll gain insights into specific people skills you can use on the job.
Working in Networked Organizations
Networked organizations allow people to communicate and work together even though they may be
thousands of miles apart. The manager’s job however, is different in a networked organization.
Motivating and leading people and making collaborative decisions online require different techniques
than wen individuals are physically present in a single location.
Enhancing Employee Well-Being at Work
One of the biggest challenges to maintaining employee well-being is that organizations are asking
employees to put in longer hours, either in the office or online. Employees are increasingly
complaining that the line between work and nonwork time has become blurred, creating personal
conflicts and stress. Second, employee well-being is challenged by heavy outside commitments.
Managers need to help to balance the work-life conflicts.
Creating a Positive Work Environment
A real growth area in OB research is positive organizational scholarship, which studies how
organizations develop human strengths, foster vitality and resilience, and unlock potential. Too much
research in OB has been done about what was wrong with organizations and their employees, they
try to study what’s good about them. They asked when employees think about when they were at
their ‘personal best’ in order to understand how to exploit their strengths.
Improving Ethical Behavior
Increasingly employees face ethical dilemmas and ethical choices, in which they are required to
identify right and wrong conduct. What constitutes ethical behavior has never been clearly defined
and, in recent years, the line differentiating right from wrong has blurred. Determining the ethically
correct way to behave is especially difficult in a global economy because different cultures have
different perspectives on certain ethical issues.
Today’s manager must create an ethically healthy climate for employees where they can do their
work productively with minimal ambiguity about right versus wrong behaviors.
COMING ATTRACTONS: DEVELOPING AN OB MODEL
An Overview
A model is an abstraction of reality, a simplified representation of some real-world phenomenon.
, Chapter 3 Attitudes
ATTITUDES
Attitudes are evaluative statements – either favorable or unfavorable – about objects, people, or
events. They reflect how we feel about something. In order to fully understand attitudes, we must
consider their fundamental properties or components.
What Are the Main Components of Attitudes?
Attitudes have three components: cognition, affect, and behavior:
- Cognitive component: a description of our belief in the way things are.
- Affective component: emotional or feeling segment of an attitude and is reflected in the statement.
- Behavioral component: describes an intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or
something.
Cognition and affect are intertwined.
In organizations, attitudes are important for their behavioral component.
Does Behavior Always Follow from Attitudes?
Early research on attitudes assumed they were causally related to behavior – that is, the attitudes
people hold determine what they do. Later, a researcher argued that attitudes follow behavior.
Subsequent researchers have agreed that attitudes predict future behavior and that moderating
variables can strengthen the link.
Cases of attitude following behavior illustrate the effects of cognitive dissonance, any incompatibility
an individual might perceive between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes.
People either alter the attitudes or the behavior, or they develop a rationalization for the discrepancy.
The desire to reduce dissonance depends on the importance of the elements creating them, the
degree of influence we believe we have on them and the rewards of dissonance.
Moderating Variables
The most powerful moderators of the attitudes relationship are the importance of the attitude, its
correspondence to behavior, its accessibility, the presence of social pressures, and whether a person
has direct experience with the attitude.
Important attitudes reflect our fundamental values, self-interest, or identification with individuals or
groups we value. Specific attitudes tend to predict specific behaviors, whereas general attitudes tend
to predict general behavior.
WHAT ARE THE MAJOR JAB ATTITUDES?
We each have thousands of attitudes, but OB focuses on a very limited number of work-related
attitudes that tap positive or negative evaluations employees hold about their work environments.
Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction describes a positive feeling about a job, resulting from an evaluation of its
characteristics.
Job Involvement
Job involvement measures the degree to which people identify psychologically with their jobs and
consider their perceived performance levels important to self-worth.
Psychological empowerment is the employees’ beliefs in the degree to which they influence their
work environments, their competencies, the meaningfulness of their jobs, and their perceived
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