Chapter 1: What is organizational behaviour?
The importance of interpersonal skills
1. Generate superior financial performance
2. Developing managers’ interpersonal skills helps organization attract and keep high-
performing employees.
3. There are strong associations between the quality of workplace relationships and
employee job satisfaction.
4. Employees who relate to their managers with supportive dialogue and proactivity find
that their ideas are endorsed more often, which improves workplace satisfaction
5. Increasing OB element in organizations can foster social responsibility awareness
Management and organizational behaviour
Managers defining characteristics is that they get things done through other people. They
make decisions, allocate resources, and direct the activities to attain goals. Managers are
sometimes called administrators, especially in not-for-profit organizations.
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 set of goals.
Managers four activities:
1. Planning: defining an organization’s goals, establishing an overall strategy for
achieving those goals, and developing a comprehensive set of plans to integrate and
coordinate activities
2. 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
3. Leading: directing and coordinating people; motivate employees, direct their
activities, select the most effective communicating channels, or resolve conflicts
4. Controlling: monitoring, comparing, and potential correcting the organization’s
performance
Management roles
Management skills
1. Technical skills encompass
the ability to apply
specialized knowledge or
expertise
2. Human skills are the ability
to understand, communicate
with, motivate, and support
other people, both
individually and in groups
3. Conceptual skills are the
ability to analyse and
, diagnose complex situations. The ability to integrate new ideas with existing processes
and innovate on the job.
Effective vs Successful managerial activities (according to Luthans)
1. Traditional management is decision making, planning, and controlling
2. Communication is
exchanging routine
information and
processing paperwork
3. Human resource
management is
motivating, disciplining,
managing conflict,
staffing, and training
4. Networking is socializing,
politicking, and interacting
with outsiders
Effective manager: defined in
terms of quantity and quality of their satisfaction and commitment of employees.
Successful manager: defined in terms of speeds of promotion within their organization
This research challenges the historical assumption that promotions are based on performance,
it illustrates the importance of networking and political skills in getting ahead in
organizations.
Organizational behaviour is a field of study that investigates the impact individuals, groups,
and structure have on behaviour within organizations.
Core topics: motivation; leader behaviour and power; interpersonal communication; group
structure and processes; attitude development and perception; change processes; conflict and
negotiation; work design.
Complementing intuition with systematic study
One believes that behaviour is not random, behaviour is generally predictable. So, the
systematic study of behaviour is a means to making reasonably accurate predictions.
Systematic study this books means 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.
Systematic study and EBM add to intuition (an instinctive feeling not necessarily supported
by research).
,Disciplines that contribute to the OB field
1. Psychology seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behaviour of
humans and other animals
2. Social psychology is considered a branch of psychology, blends concepts from both
psychology and sociology to focus on people’s influence on one another
3. Sociology studies people in relation to their social environment or culture. Contributes
to OB through their study of group behaviours in organization, especially formal and
complex organizations.
4. Anthropology is the study of societies to learn about human beings and their
activities. This has helped us understand differences in fundamental values, attitudes,
and behaviour among people in different countries and within different organizations.
There are a few absolutes in OB
OB can offer reasonably accurate explanations of human behaviour; however, it means that
the concept must reflect situational, or contingency conditions.
Contingency variables are the situational factors; variables that moderate the relationship
between two or more variables.
Challenges and opportunities for OB
Challenges:
1. Economic pressures: during bad times, the difference between good and bad
management can be the difference between profit and loss; business survival and
failure. In good times, understanding how to reward, satisfy, and retain employees is
at a premium. In bad times, issues like stress, decision making, and coping come to the
forefront.
2. Continuing globalization: the world has become a global village. In the process, the
manager’s job has changed. Effective manager will anticipate and adapt their
approaches to the global issues we discuss next:
2a. increased foreign assignment: managers need to understand everything they can
about their new location’s culture and workforce, and demonstrating their cultural
sensitivity, before introducing alternate practices.
2b. Working with people from different cultures: to work effectively with people from
different cultures, you need to understand how their culture and background have
shaped them and how to adapt your management style to fit any differences.
2c. Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labour: managers face the
difficult task of balancing the interests of their organizations with their responsibilities
to the communities in which they operate.
2d. Adapting to differing cultural and regulatory norms: managers need to know the
cultural norms of the workforce in each country they do business.
3. Workforce demographics: the workforce has always adapted to variations in
economies, longevity and birth rates, socioeconomic conditions and other changes that
have widespread impact. People adapt to survive, and studies showed that those
adaptions affect individuals’ behaviour.
, 4. Workforce diversity: organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of
employees’ gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics.
5. Customer service: many organizations has failed because its employees failed to
please customers. Management needs to create customer-responsive culture.
6. People skills: how to create more effective teams.
7. Networked organizations: allow people to communicate and work together even
though they maybe thousands of miles apart. The manager’s job is to motivate and
lead people, and making collaborate decisions online require different techniques than
when individuals are physically present in a single location.
8. Social media: could have an impact on employees’ well-being
9. Employee well-being at work: the new reality that many workers never get away
from their virtual workplace. Furthermore, employees want jobs that give them
flexibility in their work schedules so that they can better manage work-life conflicts
10. Positive organizational scholarship/positive organizational behaviour: which
studies how organization develop human strengths, foster vitality and resilience, and
unlock potential.
11. Ethical behaviour: the increasing of ethical dilemmas and ethical choices
Coming attractions: Developing an OB model
Model is an abstraction of reality, a simplified representation of some real-world
phenomenon.
Inputs are the variables like personality, group structure, and organizational culture that lead
to processes. These variables set the stage for what will occur in an organization later.
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/predict, and that are affected by
some other variables.
Outcomes
1. Attitudes and stress
Employees attitudes are the evaluations employees make, ranging from positive to
negative, about objects, people, or events.
Stress is an unpleasant psychological process that occurs in response to environmental
pressures.
2. Task performance is the combination of effectiveness and efficiency at doing your
core job tasks is a reflection of your level.
3. Organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is the desired behaviour that contributes
to the psychological and social environment of the workplace
4. Withdrawal behaviour is the set of actions (below tasks requirements) that employees
take to separate themselves from the organization
5. Group cohesion is the extent to which members of a group support and validate one
another at work. Cohesive groups are more effective.
6. Group functioning refers to the quantity and quality of a group’s work output
