Lecture 1: Introduction to OB, Personality, Learning & Motivation
Organizations: machines or ecosystems?
- Classical era; Max Weber’s bureaucracy
- Technical specialization
- Rigid (stijf) control
- Human relations era movement; Hawthorne studies
- Flexible organizations
- Group dynamics
- Employee motivation
- The contingency approach: it depends.
What is an organization?
- Organization = a social arrangement (groups of people who interact with each other because
of their membership) for achieving controlled performance (setting standards, measuring
performance, comparing actual with standard, and taking corrective action if necessary) in
pursuit of collective goals.
- Organizational dilemma = how to reconcile (verzoenen) inconsistency between individual
needs and aspirations (ambities), and the collective purpose of the organization.
- PESTLE analysis = Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Ecological issues
affecting the organization, to understand the context.
Behavior field map:
- Fundamental attribution error = the tendency to explain the behavior of others based on
their personality or disposition, and to overlook the influence of wider contextual influences.
- Organizational effectiveness = a multidimensional concept that can be defined differently by
different stakeholders.
- Balanced scorecard = an approach to defining organizational effectiveness using a
combination of quantitative and qualitative performance measures.
- Quality of working life = an individual’s overall satisfaction with their job, working conditions,
pay, colleagues, management style, organizational culture, work-life balance, and training,
development and career opportunities.
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,Explaining organizational behavior:
- Positivism = a perspective which assumes that the world can be understood in terms of
causal relationships between observable and measurable variables, and that these relationships
can be studied objectively using controlled experiments.
- Variance theory = an approach to explaining organizational behavior based on universal
relationships between independent and dependent variables which can be defined and
measured precisely.
- Constructivism = a perspective which argues that our social and organizational worlds have
no ultimate objective truth or reality, but are instead determined by our shared experiences,
meanings and interpretations.
- Process theory = an approach to explaining organizational behavior based on narratives
which show how several factors, combining and interacting over time in a particular context, are
likely to produce the outcomes of interest.
- Operational definition = the method used to measure the incidence of a variable in practice.
- Evidence-based management = systematically using the best available research evidence to
inform decisions about how to manage people and organizations.
- Human resource management = the function responsible for establishing integrated
personnel policies to support organization strategy.
- Employment cycle = the sequence of stages through which all employees pass in each
working position they hold, from recruitment and selection, to termination.
- Discretionary behavior = freedom to decide how work is going to be performed; discretionary
behavior can be positive, such as putting in extra time and effort, or it can be negative, such as
withholding information and cooperation.
- Big data = information collected, often realtime, from sources such as internet clicks, mobile
transactions, user generated content, social media, sensor networks, sales queries, purchases.
- Data analytics = the use of powerful computational methods to reveal and to visualize
patterns and trends in very large sets of data.
- Human capital analytics = an HR practice enabled by computing technologies that use
descriptive, visual and statistical analyses of data related to HR processes, human capital,
organizational performance and external economic benchmark to establish business impact and
enable evidence-based, data-driven decision-making.
What does organization behavior do?
- OB deals with attitudes and behaviors of individuals and groups in an organizational context.
- Organizational behavior = the study of the structure and management of organizations, their
environments, and the actions and interactions of their individual members and groups.
Why is it interesting?
- Most of our lives are embedded in organizations.
- Average person spends over 100.000 hours at work in life.
- 35% of one’s waking hours during working life.
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,- Non-work involves interaction with other organizations (e.g. supermarkets, bars, watching a
football match..)
- “The human side of management”
- Contemporary (hedendaags) management issues:
- Diversity
- Employee health and well-being
- Talent management & employee engagement
- Corporate social responsibility
How is OB different?
- Economics: how to utilize the talent pool to pick the best musicians?
- Psychology: Are the musicians intrinsically motivated?
- Management: What is the best time to release the new album?
- Human resource management: How can we increase the skills of each musician?
- OB:
- Are the musicians forming a band with “synergy”?
- Can they collectively improvise?
- Do they back up each other’s mistakes?
- How are the decisions being made?
- Are they committed to their band?
- To what extent a different manager would yield a different band process?
- How can the band be more creative?
How to investigate organizational behavior?
- Individuals do not perform in isolation, but they are constantly interacting with others.
- Their behaviors are influenced by their surroundings.
- Organizations are complex systems that “live” within and depend on the external environment.
- To survive and adapt, they need to transform inputs to outputs efficiently and flexibly.
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, Course overview
1. Human actors and their qualities: personalities, learning, motivation
2. Human as perceivers: perception, culture, communication
3. Humans working together: interdependence and teams
4. Humans working as teams: teamwork
5. Humans influencing their organizations: decision-making and leadership
6. Humans interacting within organizations: power and conflict
7. Humans in an organizational context: environment and technology
Personality
- “Man is the measure of all things” - Protagoras
- What is personality?
- Refers to the distinctive way by which individuals react to people, situations, and
problems and how they tend to feel, think and behave.
- Relatively stable from around the 30th birthday.
- The psychological qualities that influence an individual’s characteristic behavior patterns,
in a stable and distinctive manner.
- Some personality taxonomies:
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