Organisational Behaviour (BT1202)
Chapter 1: What is organisational behaviour?
- Google: The happiness machine
- Google’s offices and campuses around the globe reflect their overarching philosophy to create the
happiest, most productive workplace in the world
- It’s people operation department has a employee-data tracking programme to gain empirical
certainty about every aspect of the workers lives (payment level, cafeteria waiting line length etc)
- Even run experiments on employees to see the best way to manage a large firm
- Google is a company that recognises the key to its success is people
- Thus if its people are effectively managed, they are more likely to innovate, deliver a quality
product and service, constantly improve existing offers and perform beyond expectations
The importance of interpersonal skills
- Over the past decades, business faculties have realised the importance that an understanding of
human behaviour plays in determining a manager’S effectiveness
- Candidates are normally academically proficient but tend to lack the ‘soft skills’ such as team working,
effective communication, leadership and cultural awareness
- Developing these interpersonal skills is essential for managerial effectiveness
- Positive social relationships are also associated with lower stress at work and lower intentions to quit
- Employees who know how to relate to their managers well with supportive dialogue and proactivity
will find their ideas are endorsed more often
WHAT MANAGERS DO
- Managers: an individual who achieves goals and gets things done through other people
- Make decisions, allocate resources and direct the activities of others to attain goals
- Organisation: consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two+ people that functions on a
relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals
Management functions
- 4 management functions: planning, organising, leading, and controlling
- Planning: process that includes defi ning goals, establishing strategy and developing plans to
coordinate activities
- Manager should define an organisations goal, establish a strategy for achieve those goals, and
develop a comprehensive set of plans
- This seems to increase the most as managers move from lower-level to mid-level management
- Organising: 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: function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting the most effective
communication channels and resolving confl icts
- Controlling: monitoring activities to ensure that they are being accomplished as planned and
correcting any signifi cant deviations
Management roles
- Managers perform ten different, highly interrelated roles or sets of behaviours
- Interpersonal roles: required to perform duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature
- They have a figurehead role, a leadership role (hiring, training, motivating and disciplining
employees) and liaison role (contacting outsiders who provide the manager with information)
,- Informational roles: collect information from outside organisations and institutions, & act as a conduit
to transmit information to organisational members (disseminator role)
- Perform a spokesperson role when representing the organisation to outsiders
- Decisional roles: (making choices) entrepreneur role (managers initiate and oversee new projects
that will improve their organisations performance
- Disturbance handlers- managers take corrective action in response to unforeseen problems
- Resource allocators- responsible for allocating human, physical and monetary resources
- Negotiator role- discuss issues and bargain with other units to gain advantages for their own unit
Management skills (skills or competencies they need to achieve their goals
- Technical skills: apply specialised knowledge/expertise- all jobs require some specialised expertise
- Human skills: ability to work with, understand and
motivate other people individually and in groups
- Conceptual skills: mental ability to analyse and
diagnose complex situations (identify problems,
develop alternative solutions and evaluate these to
fi nd the best one)
Effective vs Successful managerial activities
- 4 managerial activities
- Traditional management: decision making,
planning and controlling
- Communication: exchanging routine
information and processing paperwork
- Human resource management: motivating,
disciplining, managing confl ict, staffi ng and training
- Networking: socialising, politicking and interacting with outsiders
- eg. Among successful managers- networking made the largest relative contribution to success
- Managers need to develop their people skills if they’re going to be effective and successful
ENTER ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
- Organisational behaviour: fi eld of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups and
structure have on behaviour within organisations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge towards
improving an organisations effectiveness
- Study of what people do and how their behaviour affects the company performance
COMPLEMENTING INTUITING WITH SYSTEMATIC STUDY
- Systematic study: looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects and drawing
conclusions based on scientifi c evidence
- Underlying the systematic approach is the belief that behaviour is not random but there are certain
fundamental consistencies underlying the behaviour of all individuals - this allows predictability
- Evidence-based management (EBM): basing managerial decisions on the best available scientifi c
evidence
- Managers must become more scientific in how they think about management problems
- Intuition: gut feeling not necessarily supported by research
- However if we make all decisions with intuition or gut instinct, we’re likely working with incomplete
information & we tend to overestimate the accuracy of what we think we know
Big data
- While big data (extensive use of statistical compilation and analysis) has been applied to many areas of
business, increasingly is also applied to making effective decisions
- Online retailers could create more targeted marketing strategies
,- With the advent of Amazon a vast array of information about consumer preferences became available
for tracking: what customers bought, what they looked at, how they navigate sites, etc
- Statistics used to develop algorithms that let the company forecast what someone would buy next
- A manager who uses data to define objectives, develop theories of causality and test those theories
can find which employee activities are relevant to the objectives
- Use evidence as much as possible to inform your intuition and experience
DISCIPLINES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE OB FIELD
- Psychology: the science that seeks to measure, explain
and sometimes change the behaviour of humans and
animals - understanding individual behaviour
- Social psychology: an area of psychology that blends
concepts from psychology and sociology and that focuses
on the infl uence of people on one another
- A major investigation has been change- how to
implement it and how to reduce barriers to its
acceptance & has contributed to the study of group
behaviour, power and conflict
- Sociology: the study of people in relation to their social
environment or culture
- Studies have contributed to OB through their study of
group behaviour in organisations and on their cultures
- Anthropology: study of societies to learn about human
beings and their activities
- Work on cultures and environments to understand
differences in fundamental values, attitudes and
behaviour between people in different countries and
organisations
There are a few absolutes in OB
- There are laws in the physical sciences that are consistent and apply in a wide range of situations -
allowing scientists to generalise about the pull of gravity etc.
- Humans are complex as they aren’t alike- our ability to make simple, accurate generalisations are
limited
- Thus OB concepts must reflect situational or contingency conditions
- eg. x leads to y but only under conditions specified in z (the contingency variables)
- Contingency variables: situational factors: variables that moderate the relationship between two or
more other variables
- eg. A job that is appealing to one person may not be to another - the job appeal is contingent on the
person who holds it
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB
- The recent global recession has brought to the
forefront the challenges of working with and
managing people during uncertain times
- These changes and others such as the rising
use of technology, employment options have
adapted to include new opportunities for
workers
Responding to economic pressure
- When times are bad, managers are on the front
, line with employees who must be fired, who are asked to make do with less and who worry about their
futures
- Managing employees well when times are tough is just as hard as when times are good
- 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 fore
Responding to globalisation
- Organisations are no longer constrained by national borders
- The world has become a global village and in the process, the manager’s job is changing
- Increased foreign assignment
- If you’re a manager, you’re increasingly likely to find yourself in a foreign assignment - transferred to
another country
- Need 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
- What motivates you may not motivate them or the style of communication may be different
- To work effectively with different cultural people, you need to understand how their culture,
geography and religion have shaped them and how to adapt your management style to their
differences
- Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labour
- It’s increasingly difficult for managers in advanced nations, where minimus wage are typically 10$ an
hour, to compete against firms who rely on workers from china and developing nations where labour
is available for about 50 cents an hour
- In a global economy jobs tend to flow to places where lower costs provide business firms with a
comparative advantage
- Managers must deal with the difficult task of balancing the interests of their organisation with their
responsibilities to the communities in which they operate
- Adapting to different cultural and regulatory norms
- Going global for a business is not as simple as tying in an overseas email address, shipping good off
to a foreign port or building facilities in other countries
- Managers need to know the cultural practices of the workforce in each country where they do
business
- Managers of subsidiaries abroad need to be aware of the unique financial and legal regulations
applying to guest companies or risk violating them, which can have economic and political
consequences
- Managers also need to be cognisant of differences in regulations for their competitors in that country
- Often, the laws will give national companies significant financial advantages over foreign
subsidiaries
Managing workforce diversity
- Globalisation focuses on differences among people from different countries- differences among people
within given countries
- Workforce diversity: the concept that organisations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of
gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and inclusion of other diverse groups
- Managing this diversity is a global concern
- The EU guarantees the freedom of movement of people between the states
- The effect has been to create considerably more diverse workforces in EU member countries in
terms of nationalities, cultures, languages and religions
Improving customer service
- Today, the majority of employees in developed countries work in service jobs
- The shared characteristic of service jobs is substantial interaction with an organisations customers
