57 pages of book summary for the course ‘Organisational Behaviour’ (BT1102). Includes all required literature chapters; Robbins, Judge & Campbell (2018)- Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12
Organisational Behaviour (BT1202)
Chapter 1: What is organisational behaviour?
- Google: The happiness machine
- Google’s offices and campuses around the globe reflect their overarching philosophy to create the
happiest, most productive workplace in the world
- It’s people operation department has a employee-data tracking programme to gain empirical
certainty about every aspect of the workers lives (payment level, cafeteria waiting line length etc)
- Even run experiments on employees to see the best way to manage a large firm
- Google is a company that recognises the key to its success is people
- Thus if its people are effectively managed, they are more likely to innovate, deliver a quality
product and service, constantly improve existing offers and perform beyond expectations
The importance of interpersonal skills
- Over the past decades, business faculties have realised the importance that an understanding of
human behaviour plays in determining a manager’S effectiveness
- Candidates are normally academically proficient but tend to lack the ‘soft skills’ such as team working,
effective communication, leadership and cultural awareness
- Developing these interpersonal skills is essential for managerial effectiveness
- Positive social relationships are also associated with lower stress at work and lower intentions to quit
- Employees who know how to relate to their managers well with supportive dialogue and proactivity
will find their ideas are endorsed more often
WHAT MANAGERS DO
- Managers: an individual who achieves goals and gets things done through other people
- Make decisions, allocate resources and direct the activities of others to attain goals
- Organisation: consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two+ people that functions on a
relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals
Management functions
- 4 management functions: planning, organising, leading, and controlling
- Planning: process that includes defi ning goals, establishing strategy and developing plans to
coordinate activities
- Manager should define an organisations goal, establish a strategy for achieve those goals, and
develop a comprehensive set of plans
- This seems to increase the most as managers move from lower-level to mid-level management
- Organising: determining what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be
grouped, who reports to whom and where decisions are to be made
- Leading: function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting the most effective
communication channels and resolving confl icts
- Controlling: monitoring activities to ensure that they are being accomplished as planned and
correcting any signifi cant deviations
Management roles
- Managers perform ten different, highly interrelated roles or sets of behaviours
- Interpersonal roles: required to perform duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature
- They have a figurehead role, a leadership role (hiring, training, motivating and disciplining
employees) and liaison role (contacting outsiders who provide the manager with information)
,- Informational roles: collect information from outside organisations and institutions, & act as a conduit
to transmit information to organisational members (disseminator role)
- Perform a spokesperson role when representing the organisation to outsiders
- Decisional roles: (making choices) entrepreneur role (managers initiate and oversee new projects
that will improve their organisations performance
- Disturbance handlers- managers take corrective action in response to unforeseen problems
- Resource allocators- responsible for allocating human, physical and monetary resources
- Negotiator role- discuss issues and bargain with other units to gain advantages for their own unit
Management skills (skills or competencies they need to achieve their goals
- Technical skills: apply specialised knowledge/expertise- all jobs require some specialised expertise
- Human skills: ability to work with, understand and
motivate other people individually and in groups
- Conceptual skills: mental ability to analyse and
diagnose complex situations (identify problems,
develop alternative solutions and evaluate these to
fi nd the best one)
Effective vs Successful managerial activities
- 4 managerial activities
- Traditional management: decision making,
planning and controlling
- Communication: exchanging routine
information and processing paperwork
- Human resource management: motivating,
disciplining, managing confl ict, staffi ng and training
- Networking: socialising, politicking and interacting with outsiders
- eg. Among successful managers- networking made the largest relative contribution to success
- Managers need to develop their people skills if they’re going to be effective and successful
ENTER ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
- Organisational behaviour: fi eld of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups and
structure have on behaviour within organisations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge towards
improving an organisations effectiveness
- Study of what people do and how their behaviour affects the company performance
COMPLEMENTING INTUITING WITH SYSTEMATIC STUDY
- Systematic study: looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects and drawing
conclusions based on scientifi c evidence
- Underlying the systematic approach is the belief that behaviour is not random but there are certain
fundamental consistencies underlying the behaviour of all individuals - this allows predictability
- Evidence-based management (EBM): basing managerial decisions on the best available scientifi c
evidence
- Managers must become more scientific in how they think about management problems
- Intuition: gut feeling not necessarily supported by research
- However if we make all decisions with intuition or gut instinct, we’re likely working with incomplete
information & we tend to overestimate the accuracy of what we think we know
Big data
- While big data (extensive use of statistical compilation and analysis) has been applied to many areas of
business, increasingly is also applied to making effective decisions
- Online retailers could create more targeted marketing strategies
,- With the advent of Amazon a vast array of information about consumer preferences became available
for tracking: what customers bought, what they looked at, how they navigate sites, etc
- Statistics used to develop algorithms that let the company forecast what someone would buy next
- A manager who uses data to define objectives, develop theories of causality and test those theories
can find which employee activities are relevant to the objectives
- Use evidence as much as possible to inform your intuition and experience
DISCIPLINES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE OB FIELD
- Psychology: the science that seeks to measure, explain
and sometimes change the behaviour of humans and
animals - understanding individual behaviour
- Social psychology: an area of psychology that blends
concepts from psychology and sociology and that focuses
on the infl uence of people on one another
- A major investigation has been change- how to
implement it and how to reduce barriers to its
acceptance & has contributed to the study of group
behaviour, power and conflict
- Sociology: the study of people in relation to their social
environment or culture
- Studies have contributed to OB through their study of
group behaviour in organisations and on their cultures
- Anthropology: study of societies to learn about human
beings and their activities
- Work on cultures and environments to understand
differences in fundamental values, attitudes and
behaviour between people in different countries and
organisations
There are a few absolutes in OB
- There are laws in the physical sciences that are consistent and apply in a wide range of situations -
allowing scientists to generalise about the pull of gravity etc.
- Humans are complex as they aren’t alike- our ability to make simple, accurate generalisations are
limited
- Thus OB concepts must reflect situational or contingency conditions
- eg. x leads to y but only under conditions specified in z (the contingency variables)
- Contingency variables: situational factors: variables that moderate the relationship between two or
more other variables
- eg. A job that is appealing to one person may not be to another - the job appeal is contingent on the
person who holds it
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB
- The recent global recession has brought to the
forefront the challenges of working with and
managing people during uncertain times
- These changes and others such as the rising
use of technology, employment options have
adapted to include new opportunities for
workers
Responding to economic pressure
- When times are bad, managers are on the front
, line 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 tough is just as hard as when times are good
- 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 globalisation
- Organisations are no longer constrained by national borders
- The world has become a global village and in the process, the manager’s job is changing
- Increased foreign assignment
- If you’re a manager, you’re increasingly likely to find yourself in a foreign assignment - transferred to
another country
- Need to manage a workforce that is likely to be very different in needs, aspirations and attitudes from
those you are used to back home
- Working with people from different cultures
- What motivates you may not motivate them or the style of communication may be different
- To work effectively with different cultural people, 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 labour
- It’s increasingly difficult for managers in advanced nations, where minimus wage are typically 10$ an
hour, to compete against firms who rely on workers from china and developing nations where labour
is available for about 50 cents an hour
- In a global economy jobs tend to flow to places where lower costs provide business firms with a
comparative advantage
- Managers must deal with the difficult task of balancing the interests of their organisation with their
responsibilities to the communities in which they operate
- Adapting to different cultural and regulatory norms
- Going global for a business is not as simple as tying in an overseas email address, shipping good off
to a foreign port or building facilities in other countries
- Managers need to know the cultural practices of the workforce in each country where they do
business
- Managers of subsidiaries abroad need to be aware of the unique financial and legal regulations
applying to guest companies or risk violating them, which can have economic and political
consequences
- Managers also need to be cognisant of differences in regulations for their competitors in that country
- Often, the laws will give national companies significant financial advantages over foreign
subsidiaries
Managing workforce diversity
- Globalisation focuses on differences among people from different countries- differences among people
within given countries
- Workforce diversity: the concept that organisations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of
gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and inclusion of other diverse groups
- Managing this diversity is a global concern
- The EU guarantees the freedom of movement of people between the states
- The effect has been to create considerably more diverse workforces in EU member countries in
terms of nationalities, cultures, languages and religions
Improving customer service
- Today, the majority of employees in developed countries work in service jobs
- The shared characteristic of service jobs is substantial interaction with an organisations customers
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller ibcomsums2021. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for $4.59. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
