Chapter 1: What is organizational behaviour ?
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The importance of Interpersonal skills:
Incorporating OB principles into the workplace can yield many important organizational
outcomes.
1. Companies have been found to generate superior financial performance
2. It helps organizations attract and keep high-performing employees
3. Strong associations exist between quality of workplace relationships and employee
job satisfaction, stress and turnover
4. Increasing the OB element in organizations can foster social responsibility
awareness
Management and organizational behaviour:
The most notable characteristic of managers is that they get things done through other
people. Managers are sometimes called administrators, especially in non-profit
organizations. They do their work in an 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.
Identifying a manager’s primary activities:
1. The planning function is a process that includes defining goals, establishing strategy
and developing plans to coordinate activities
2. Organizing = determining what tasks are to be done, who is to do them etc
3. Leading = A function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting
most effective communication channels etc.
4. Controlling = monitoring activities to ensure that they are being accomplished as
planned and correcting any significant deviations.
Management roles:
1. Interpersonal Roles: all managers are required to perform duties that are
ceremonial and symbolic in nature
- Kinderen op school iets meedelen = figurehead role
- aannemen van mensen, motiveren, disciplineren = leadership role
- liaison role = containing and fostering relationships with others who provide
valuable information
2. Informational Roles:
- Monitor role = All managers collect information from outside organizations
and institutions, by talking to people, social media etc.
- Disseminator role = managers also act as a conduit to transmit information to
organizational members.
- Spokesperson role = when they represent the organization to outsiders.
, 3. Decisional Roles: Mintzberg identified four roles that require decision making:
- Entrepreneur role = managers initiate and oversee new projects that will
improve performance
- Disturbance handlers = managers take corrective actions in response to
unforeseen problems.
- Resource allocators = managers are responsible for allocating human,
physical and monetary resources
- Negotiator role = they discuss issues and bargain with other units
Management Skills:
Research have identified a number of skills that differentiate effective from ineffective
managers:
1. Technical Skills: encompass the ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise.
2. Human Skills: the ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people, both
individually and in group.
3. Conceptual Skills: the mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations.
Effective versus Successful Managerial Activities:
1. Traditional management = Decision making, planning, and controlling
2. Communication: Exchanging routine information and processing paperwork
3. Human resources management = Motivating, disciplining, managing conflicts
4. Networking = Socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders.
What is organizational behaviour?
It is a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups and structure have
on behaviour with organizations for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward
improving an organization's effectiveness
Ob focuses on 3 determinant behavior in organizations:
1. Individuals
2. Groups
3. Structure
,Completing Intuition with Systematic Study:
Systematic behavior = a way to make reasonably accurate predictions. With systematic
behaviour we mean looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects, and
basing our conclusions on scientific evidence.
Evidence-based management (EBM) = Complements systematic study by basing
managerial decisions on the best available scientific evidence.
- Intuition = an instinctive feeling not necessarily supported by research.
Big Data:
Let’s look at the roots of the application of big data for business, which originated in the
marketing department of online retailers.
- Background: Earlier, the challenge was to identify which statistics were persistent
(giving relatively constant outcomes) and which were predictive (showing steady
causality between certain inputs and outcomes.
- Current usage: waarvoor wordt het gebruikt, en wat kan er mee worden beschermd.
predicting any event and preventing catastrophes.
- New Trends: ability to predict human behaviour trends, the use of big data for
understanding, helping and managing people is relatively new but holds promise.
- Limitations: As technological capabilities for handling big data have increased, so
have issues for privacy.
Disciplines That Contribute to OB:
Psychology = seeks to measure, explain and sometimes change the behaviour of humans
and other animals.
Social Psychology = generally considered a branch of psychology, blends concepts from
both psychology and sociology to focus on people’s influence on one another.
Sociology = studies people in relation to their social environment or culture
Anthropology = the study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities.
There Are Few Absolutes in OB:
Contingency variables = are situational factors or variables that moderate the relationship
between two or more variables.
Challenges and opportunities:
In short, today’s challenges bring opportunities for managers to use OB concepts. Some of
the most critical issues confronting managers for which OB offers solutions are:
1. Economic Pressures: When times are bad, during recession, managers are the
frontline with employees who are asked to make do with less
2. Continuing Globalization: Organizations are no longer constrained by national
borders. The world has become a global village. Effective managers anticipate and
adapt their approaches to the global issues we discuss next
- Increased Foreign Assignment
- Working with People From Different Cultures
- Overseeing Movement of Jobs to Countries with Low-Cost Labour
, - Adapting to Differing Cultural and Regulatory Norms
3. Workforce Demographics: Longevity and birth rates have also changed the
dynamics in organizations.
4. Workforce Diversity: This is the concept by which organizations are becoming more
heterogeneous in terms of employees gender, age, race etc.
5. Customer Service: Is how employees attitudes and behaviour influence customer
satisfaction
6. People Skills
7. Networking Organizations: these organizations allow people to communicate and
work together even though they may be thousands of miles apart.
8. Social Media: Struggle that employees use social media on the workplace
9. Employee Well-Being at Work
10. 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.
11. Ethical Behaviour: Employees face increasingly ethical dilemmas and ethical
choices, in which they are required to identify right and wrong conduct.
Coming Attractions: Developing an OB Model:
A Model = an abstraction of reality, a simplified representation of some real world
phenomenon. The model illustrates that inputs lead to processes, which lead to outcomes.
Inputs: are variables like personality, group structure, and organizational culture that lead to
processes
Processes: are actions that individuals, groups and organizations engage in as a result of
inputs and that lead to certain outcomes
Outcomes: are the key variables that you want to explain or predict and that are affected by
other variables.
Primary outcomes in OB are: individual level
1. Attitudes and stress: stress = a psychological process that occurs in response to
environmental pressures.
2. Task performance = the combination of effectiveness and efficiency at doing core
job tasks.
3. Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) = the discretionary behaviour that is
not part of an employee’s formal job requirement, and that contributes to the
psychological and social environment of the workplace => citizenship behaviour dus
4. Withdrawal behaviour = the set of actions that employees take to seperate themself
from the organization. => te laat komen, niet naar meetings gaan etc.
- Turnover is harmful for an organization's performance.
Turnover includes quitting, layoffs and discharge, firing
Primary outcomes in OB are: Group level
1. Group cohesion = the extent to which members of a group support and validate one
another while at work
