Organizational Behaviour
Chapter 1 What is organizational behaviour?
– Demonstrate the importance of interpersonal skills in the workplace.
– Describe the manager’s functions, roles, and skills.
– Define organizational behavior (OB).
– Show the value to OB of systematic study.
– Identify the major behavioral science disciplines that contribute to OB.
– Demonstrate why few absolutes apply to OB.
– Identify the challenges and opportunities managers have in applying OB concepts.
– Compare the three levels of analysis in this book’s OB model.
Creating a pleasant workplace appears to make good economic sense. We have to understand that
technical skills are necessary, but they are not enough to succeed in management, these days people
skills are needed as well.
Managers: individuals who achieve goals through other people
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.
Planning: a process that includes defining goals, establishing strategy, and developing plans to
coordinate activities.
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
Leading: a function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting the most
effective communication channels and resolving conflicts.
Controlling: monitoring activities to ensure that they are being accomplished as planned and
correcting any significant deviations.
Mintzberg’s managerial roles
Role Description
Interpersonal
Figurehead Required to perform a number of routine duties of a legal/ social nature
Leader Responsible for motivation + direction employees
Liaison Maintains a network of outside contacts who provide favours and information
Informational
Monitor Receives a wide variety of internal and external information
Disseminator Transmits info received from outsiders or other employees
Spokesman Transmits info to outsiders on organization’s plans, policies, actions and results
Decisional
Entrepreneur Searches organization and its environment for opportunities + projects
Disturbance Responsible for corrective action when organization faces important,
handler unexpected disturbance
Resource Makes or approves significant organizational decisions
allocator
Negotiator Responsible for representing the organization at major negotiations
Technical skills: the ability to apply specialised knowledge or expertise
Human skills: the ability to work with, understand and motivate other people, both
individually and in groups
, Conceptual skills: the mental ability to analyse and diagnose complex situations
All managers engage four 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: socialising, politicking and interacting with outsiders.
Successful: defined in terms of the speed of promotion within their organization
Effective: defined in terms of the quantity and quality of their performance and satisfaction
and commitment of their employees.
Organizational behaviour: a field of study that investigates the impact that individuals,
groups and structure have on behaviour within organizations, for the purpose of applying
such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness.
Systematic study: looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects and
drawing conclusions based on scientific evidence.
Evidence-based management (EBM): basing managerial decisions on the best available
scientific evidence.
o Psychology: the science that seeks to measure, explain and sometimes change the behaviour
of humans and other animals.
o Socials psychology: an area of psychology that blends concepts from psychology and
sociology and that focuses on the influence of people on one another.
o Sociology: the study of people in relation to their social environment or culture
o Anthropology: the study of societies to learn about human being and their activities
Ob concept must reflect situational/contingency, conditions. We can say that x leads to y, but only
under conditions specified in z: ‘’The contingency variables’’ : situational factors: variables that
moderate the relationship between two or more other variables.
Challenges and opportunities managers have in applying OB concepts
Responding to globalisation: organizations are no longer constrained by national borders (Heineken
owns breweries in 60 other countries). The world has become a global village. In the process, the
manager’s job is changing.
Increased foreign assignments: if you’re manager, you are likely to find yourself in an foreign
assignment. You will have 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
Coping with anticapitalism backlash: management practices need to be modified to reflect
the values of the different countries in which an organizations operates.
Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labour: in a global economy, jobs
tend to flow to places where lower costs provide business firms with a comparative
advantage. Such practices, however, are often strongly criticised. Managers must deal with
the difficult task of balancing the interests of their organizations with their responsibilities to
the communities in which they operate.
Managing workforce diversity: one of the most important challenges is adapting to people who are
different: ‘’the concept that organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender, age,
race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and inclusion of other diverse groups’’.
Embracing diversity: these days we recognize that employee’s don’t set aside their cultural
values etc. Therefore, the challenge for organizations is to accommodate to these diverse
, groups of people. The melting-pot assumption is replaced by recognising values and
differences.
Changing European demographics: there have been two significant demographic changes in
the European labour market: age and gender. Europe’s ageing population officially makes it
the ‘oldest continent’. These days there also a lot of women workers.
Implications: managers have to shift their philosophy from treating everyone alike to
recognising differences and responding to those differences in ways that ensure employee
retention (behoud) and greater productivity while, ate the same time, not discriminating.
Improving quality and productivity: these days here is a lot of excess of supply. Excess capacity
translates into increased competition. Increased competition is forcing managers to reduce costs and,
at the same time, improve their organizations’ productivity and the quality of the products and
services they offer. Today’s managers understand that the success of any effort at improving quality
and productivity must include their employees. These employees will not only be a major force in
carrying out changes but also will actively participate in planning those things.
Improving customer service: managers needs to create a customer-responsive culture. Cultures in
which employees are friendly and polite, accessible, knowledgeable in responding to customer needs
and willing to do what’s necessary to please the customer.
Improving people skills
Stimulating innovating and change: today’s organizations must keep up with innovating an master
the art of change. The challenge for managers is to stimulate their employee’s creativity and
tolerance for change.
Coping with ‘temporariness’: with change comes temporariness. Globalization, expanded capacity
and advances in technology have caused that organizations has to be fast and flexible if they want to
survive. The result is that most managers and employees today work in a climate best characterised
as ‘temporary’. Employees used to have specific work groups, security and there was a certain
predictability. Today’s managers and employees must learn to cope with temporariness, flexibility and
unpredictability.
Working in networked organizations
Positive organizational scholarship: an area of OB research that concerns how organizations
develop human strength, foster vitality and resilience, and unlock potential.
Ethical dilemmas: situations in which individuals are required to define right and wrong
conduct.
Model: an abstraction of reality. A simplified representation of some real-world
phenomenon.
Dependent variable: a response that is affected by an independent variable.
- Productivity: a performance measure that includes effectiveness and efficiency.
- effectiveness: achievement of goals
- efficiency: the ratio of effective output to the input required to achieve it.
- Absenteeism: the failure to report to work.
- turnover: voluntary and involuntary permanent withdrawal from an organization
- deviant workplace behaviour: voluntary behaviour that violates significant
organizational norms and, in so doing, threatens the well-being of the organization
and its members.
- Organizational citizenship behaviour: discretionary behaviour that is not part of an
employee’s formal job requirements, but that nevertheless promotes the effective
functioning of an organization.
- Job satisfaction
, Independent variables: the presumed cause of some change in a dependent variable.
- Individual-level variables: people will enter an organization with their own
characteristics that will influence their behaviour at work.
- Group level variables: people’s behaviour changes when they are in a group.
- Organization system-lever variables: organizational behaviour reaches its highest
level of sophistication we add formal structure to our previous knowledge of
individual and group behaviour.
