This is the summary for the midterm material for the course Organisational Behaviour offered in the first year of Business Administration at the University of Amsterdam.
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Organisational Behaviour (6011P0215Y)
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Organizational Behaviour Midterm Summary
Chapter 1: What Is Organizational Behavior?
OB principles incorporated into the workplace can yield many important organizational outcomes. For
example, (1) developing managers’ interpersonal skills helps organizations attract and keep high-performing
employees, (2) good places to work have found to generate superior nancial performance, (3) there are
strong associations between the quality of workplace relationships and employee job satisfaction, stress
and turnover, and (4) an increased OB element in organizations can foster social responsibility awareness.
Managers are individuals that get things done through other people. An organization is a consciously
coordinated social unit composed of two or more people that functions on a relatively continuous basis to
achieve a common goal or a set of goals. The work of managers can be condensed to four activities:
- Planning is a process that includes de ning goals, establishing strategy and developing plans to
coordinate activities.
- Organizing means 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 is a function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting the most e ective
communication channels and resolving con icts.
- Controlling means monitoring activities to ensure they are being accomplished as planned and
correcting any signi cant deviations.
Henry Mintzberg concluded that managers perform 10 di erent, highly interrelated roles, or sets of
behaviour which serve a critical function in organizations. These 10 roles are primarily:
1) Interpersonal roles; all managers are required to perform duties that are ceremonial and symbolic of
nature. For example, all managers have a gurehead role (they represent the organisation), leadership
role and liaison role (they foster relationships with other who provide valuable information).
2) Informational roles; all managers collect information from outside the organizations (the monitor role),
transmit this information to members of the organizations (the disseminator role) and represent the
organization to outsiders (the spokesperson role).
3) Decisional roles; managers initiate and oversee new project (the entrepreneur role), they take corrective
action in response to unforeseen problems (the disturbance handlers role), they are responsible for
allocating human, physical and monetary resources (the resource allocators role), and they discuss
issues and bargain with other units (the negotiator role).
Another way to consider what managers do, is to look at the skills they need to achieve their goals:
1) Technical skills; the ability to apply specialised knowledge or expertise.
2) Human skills; the ability to work with, understand and motivate other people, both individually and in
groups.
3) Conceptual skills; the mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations.
Fred Luthans and his associates argue that all managers engage in four managerial activities:
1) Traditional management; decision making, planning and controlling.
2) Communication; exchanging routine information and processing paperwork.
3) Human resource management; motivating, discipling, managing con ict, sta ng and training.
4) Networking; socializing, politicking and interacting with outsiders.
Successful managers (in terms of promotion) engage most in networking, while e cient managers (in terms
of quantity and quality of performance, satisfaction and commitment) engage most in communication.
Organizational behaviour is a eld of study that investigates the impact individuals, groups and structure
have on behaviour within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an
organization’s e ectiveness. OB includes the following core topics:
- Motivation
- Leader behaviour and power
- Interpersonal communication
- Group structure and processes
- Attitude development and perception
- Change processes
- Con ict and negotiation
- Work design
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, We can identify fundamental consistencies underlying the behaviour of all individuals and modify them to
re ect individual di erences. A systematic study looks at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and
e ects, and drawing conclusions based on scienti c evidence. Evidence-based management (EBM)
complements systematic study by basing managerial decisions on the best available scienti c evidence.
This might seem logical, but a majority of the management decisions are still made based on intuition (an
instinctive feeling) so with little systematic study of available evidence.
“Big data” (the extensive use of statistical compilation and analysis) became possible when computers
were sophisticated enough to store and manipulate large amounts of information. It is used by managers to
predict consumers’ interests and needs, for example the algorithm of online shopping. However, big data is
always limited in predicting behaviour so intuition still plays an important role.
OB is an applied behavioural science build on contributions from a number of behavioural disciplines:
- Psychology (micro level); seeks to measure, explain and sometimes change the behaviour of humans
and other animals.
- Social psychology (macro level); blends concepts from psychology and sociology to focus on the
in uence of people on one another.
- Sociology (macro level); studies people in relation to their social environment or culture.
- Anthropology (macro level); studies societies to learn about human beings and their activities.
Human beings are complex so few, if any, universal principles explain organizational behaviour. Basically,
the ability to make accurate generalizations about ourselves is limited. However, this doesn’t mean we
cannot o er accurate explanations of human behaviour or make valid predictions. OB is best understood
when both the general e ects and the contingencies are looked at. Contingency variables are situational
factors; variables that moderate the relationship between two or more variables (x → z → y). They tell us
what the moderating factors are (why are attitudes and behaviours sometimes very similar and why are they
sometimes not at all). Examples are: social pressures and attitudes’s importance.
Understanding OB has become more important due to three factors: (1) the typical employee is getting
older, (2) the workforce is becoming more diverse and (3) global competition requires employees to become
more exible and cope with rapid change. Managers face multiple critical issues:
• Economic pressures; the type of management can, in bad times, be the di erence between business
survival and failure.
• Continuing globalization; there are increased foreign assignments, people have to work with people
from di erent cultures, managers need to oversee movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labor
and managers need to adapt to di ering cultural and regulatory norms.
• Workforce demographics; variations in economies, longevity and birth rates, socioeconomic
conditions, and other changes have widespread impact.
• Workforce diversity; organizations are more heterogenous in terms of age, race, gender, sexual
orientation, etc.
• Customer service; managers need to create a customer-responsive culture because of the substantial
interaction with employees and an organization’s customers.
• People skills
• Networked organizations; a lot of jobs allow people to communicate and work together even though
they may be thousands of miles apart. Managers need di erent techniques to motivate employees in
these kind of job elds.
• Social media
• Employee well-being at work; technology allows many employees to work from home but the
employee’s well-being is challenged by heavy outside commitments. Employees have increased
responsibilities so they want more exibility in their work schedules to manage work-life con icts.
• Positive work environment; positive organizational scholarship is an area of OB research that
concerns how organizations develop human strength, foster vitality and resilience, and unlock
potential. Researchers in this area try to study what is good about organizations, instead of focusing
on what is wrong. These researchers try to help managers create positive work environments.
• Ethical behaviour; employees increasingly face ethical dilemmas and ethical choices in the current
world full of pressures. Determining the ethically correct way to behave is especially di cult for both
managers and employees in a global economy because di erent culture have di erent perspectives on
certain ethical issues.
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