Chapter 1: What is Organizational Behavior?
The Importance of Interpersonal Skills
- Until the 1980s business schools focused on technical aspects (accounting, finance, economics etc.) but missed
people skills, emotional intelligence, relationships and understanding human behavior at work. Shifts the focus
towards people.
- Interpersonal skills play a role in determining a manager’s effectiveness.
- Incorporation organizational behavior (OB) into the workplace can yield many important organizational
outcomes.
1. Companies known as good places to work have been found to generate superior financial performance e.g.
Facebook and Southwest Airlines.
2. 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.
3. There are strong associations between the quality of workplace relationships and employee job satisfaction,
stress, and turnover.
4. Increasing the OB element in organizations can foster social responsibility awareness. Therefore, there is
emphasis on social entrepreneurship which encourages understanding of corporate social responsibility
(CSR).
- In today’s competitive and demanding workplace, managers can’t succeed on their technical skills alone. They
also have to exhibit good people skills with the knowledge that understanding human behavior provides.
Management and Organizational Behavior
- Manager: an individual who achieves goals through other people.
o They make decisions, allocate resources, and direct the activities of others to attain goals.
o Sometimes called administrators, especially in non-for-profit organizations.
o Do work in an organization.
- Organization: a consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two or more people, that functions on a
relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals.
o E.g. manufacturing and service firms, schools, hospitals, government agencies etc.
- A manager is someone placed into the position without management training or informed experience.
o In a survey, 58% of managers had not received training and 25% admitted they were not read to lead other
when they were given the role.
- The demands of being a manager has increased. The average manager has 7 direct reports and has less
management time to spend with them than before.
- Manager’s primary activities:
o Planning: a process that includes defining goals, establishing strategy, and developing a comprehensive set
of plans to integrate and coordinate activities. The need for planning increases the most as managers move
from lower-level to mid-level management.
o Organizing: 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. Managers design their work unit’s structure.
o Leading: a function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting the most effective
communication channels, and resolving conflicts. Every organization contains people, and it is management’s
job to direct and coordinate those people.
o Controlling: monitoring activities to ensure they are being accomplished as planned and correcting any
significant deviations. To ensure things are going as they should, management must monitor the
organization’s performance and compare it with previously set goals. If there are any significant deviations,
it is management’s job to get the organization back on track.
Management Roles
- Henry Mintzberg, now a prominent management scholar, undertook a careful study of executives to determine
what they did on their jobs early in his career. Mintzberg concluded that managers perform 10 different, highly
interrelated roles, or sets of behaviors, and serve a critical function in organizations.
- These 10 roles are primarily interpersonal, informational, or decisional.
- Although much has changed in the world of work since Mintzberg developed this model, research indicates the
roles have changed very little.
, MANAGEMENT ROLES – Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles
INTERPERSONAL
1. Figurehead All managers are required to perform a number of routine social or legal duties that are
ceremonial and symbolic in nature.
2. Leader Responsible for the motivation and direction of employees. This role includes hiring,
training, motivating, and disciplining employees.
3. Liaison Includes contacting and fostering relationships with others who provide valuable
information. Manager maintains a network of outside contacts who provide favors and
information.
o Internal liaison relationship: between sales manager and quality-control manager
within company.
o External liaison relationship: between sales manager and other sales executives
through a marketing trade association.
INFORMATIONAL
4. Monitor Receives a wide variety of information; serves as nerve center of internal and external
information of the organization. All managers, to some degree, collect information
from outside organizations, typically by scanning the news media and talking with
other people to learn of changes in the public’s tastes and what competitors
may be planning.
5. Disseminator Managers act as a conduit to transmit information received from outsiders or from
other employees to members of the organization.
6. Spokesperson Managers represent the organization when they transmit information to outsiders on
organization’s plans, policies, actions, and results; serve as an expert on organization’s
industry.
DECISIONAL
7. Entrepreneur Searches organization and its environment for opportunities and initiates projects to
bring about change. Managers initiate and oversee new projects that will improve their
organization’s performance.
8. Disturbance handler Responsible for corrective action when organization faces important, unexpected
disturbances and unforeseen problems.
9. Resource allocator Managers are responsible for allocating human, physical, and monetary resources.
Makes or approves significant organizational decisions.
10. Negotiator Responsible for representing the organization at major negotiations. They discuss
issues and bargain with other units (internal or external) to gain advantages for their
own unit.
Management Skills
- There are a number of skills or competencies that managers need in order to achieve their goals and that
differentiate effective from ineffective managers. Each of these skills is important, and all are needed to become
a well-rounded and effective manager.
1. Technical skills: the ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise. All jobs require some specialized
expertise, and many people develop their technical skills on the job.
2. Human skills: the ability to work with, understand, communicate, support and motivate other people, both
individually and in groups. Because managers get things done through other people, they must have good
human skills.
3. Conceptual skills: the mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations. The ability to integrate
new ideas with existing processes and innovate on the job are also crucial conceptual skills for today’s
managers.
Effective versus Successful Managerial Activities
- Fred Luthans studied 450 managers and looked at what managers do from a different perspective – they asked,
“Do managers who move up most quickly in an organization do the same activities and with the same emphasis
as managers who do the best job?” You might think the answer is yes, but that’s not always the case.
- All the managers engaged 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, disciplining,
managing conflict, staffing, and training.
4. Networking: socializing, politicking, and interacting with
outsiders.
- The “average” manager spent:
o 32% of his time in traditional management activities
o 29% communicating
o 20% in human resource management activities
o 19% networking.
- Among “successful” managers (defined in terms of speed of promotion), networking made the largest relative
contribution to success, and human resource management activities made the least relative contribution.
- Among “effective” managers (defined
- in terms of quantity and quality of their performance and the satisfaction and commitment of employees),
communication made the largest relative contribution and networking the least.
- Other studies confirm the link between networking, social relationships, and success within an organization.
- The connection between communication and effective managers is also clear. Managers who explain their
decisions and seek information from colleagues and employees—even if the information turns out to be
negative—are the most effective.
- “Successful” managers and “effective” managers give opposing emphases to the four managerial activities.
- This finding challenges the historical assumption that promotions are based on performance, and it illustrates
the importance of networking and political skills in getting ahead in organizations.
- Organizational behavior (OB): 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.
o Field of study: a distinct area of expertise with a common body of knowledge.
o It studies three determinants: individuals, groups, and structure.
o OB is the study of what people do in an organization and the way their behavior affects the organization’s
performance.
o Concerned with employment-related situations - behavior in the context of job satisfaction, absenteeism,
employment turnover, productivity, human performance, and management.
Complementing Intuition with Systematic Study
- The casual approach to reading others, by watching others’ actions and interpreting them, can often lead to
erroneous predictions. Using a systematic approach can improve your accuracy.
- Systematic study: looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects, and drawing conclusions
based on scientific evidence – evidence—that is, on data gathered under controlled conditions and measured and
interpreted in a rigorous manner.
o Behavior is generally predictable, and the systematic study of behavior is a means to making reasonably
accurate predictions.
o The vast majority of management. decisions are still made “on the fly,” with little to no systematic study of
available evidence.
o Data/big data
- Evidence-based management (EBM): complements systematic study by basing of managerial decisions on the
best available scientific evidence.
o Pose a question and earch for the best available evidence.
o Apply the relevant information to your question.
- Intuition: an instinctive feeling not necessarily supported by research.
o Systematic study and EBM add to intuition.
o ‘Reading people.’
o Your gut feeling.
o We cannot make all decisions with intuition because we are likely to work with incomplete information.
o Common sense if often wrong.
Big Data
- Data has been used to evaluate behavior since at least 1749, when the word “statistic” was coined to mean a
“description of state.” Back then, they were used for purposes of governance, but the data collection methods
were simple and clumsy and so were the conclusions.
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