Chapter 1: What is organizational behavior?

1. Demonstrate the importance of interpersonal skills in the workplace.

Soft Skills — Team working, communicating effectively, leadership and cultural awareness. These
interpersonal skills are essential for managerial effectiveness: easier to hire and keep qualified people.

2. Describe the manager’s functions, roles and skills

Managers — Get things done through other people. They make decisions, allocate resources and direct
the activities of others to attain goals. Managers do their work in an organization, which 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 perform four management functions:

1. Planning — 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, how the tasks are to
be grouped, who reports to whom and where decisions are to be made.
3. Leading — Function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting the most
effective communication channels and resolving conflicts.
4. Controlling — Monitoring activities to ensure that they are being accomplished as planned and
correcting any significant deviations.

Managers perform 10 different, highly interrelated roles. These are grouped as:

Interpersonal Roles
a. Figurehead Role — Performing duties that are ceremonial in nature.
b. Leadership Role — Training, motivating and disciplining employees.
c. Liaison Role — Contacting outsiders who provide the manager with information.

Informational Roles
a. Monitor Role — Collecting information from outside organizations and institutions.
b. Disseminator Role — Transmitting information to organizational members.
c. Spokesperson Role — Representing the organization to outsiders.

Decisional Roles
a. Entrepreneur Role — Initiating, overseeing projects that will improve an orgs performance.
b. Disturbance Handlers — Taking corrective action in response to unforeseen problems.
c. Resource Allocators — Responsible for allocating human, physical and monetary resources.
d. Negotiator Role — Discussing issues and bargain with other units to gain advantages for
their own unit.
Management Skills:

 Technical Skills — Ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise.

 Human Skills — Ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people: individual/group.
 Conceptual Skills — Mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations.

Managers engage in four managerial 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, training.
4. Networking — Socializing, politicking and interacting with outsiders.

Managers who are successful (defined in terms of the speed of promotion within their organization
have a very different emphasis from managers who are effective (defined in terms of the quantity and
quality of their performance and the satisfaction and commitment of their employees).

3. Define organizational behavior.

Organizational Behavior — A field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and
structure have on behavior within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward
improving an organization’s effectiveness

4. Show the value to OB of systematic study.

There are certain fundamental consistencies underlying the behavior of all individuals that can be
identified and then modified to reflect individual differences. Behavior is generally predictable, and the
systematic study of behavior is a means to making reasonably accurate predictions.

Systematic Study — Can be time-consuming.

Evidence-based Management (EBM) — Basing managerial decisions on the best available scientific
evidence.

Intuition — Gut feeling not necessarily supported by research, often based on inaccurate information.

Core values of science:

 Accuracy
 Objectivity
 Skepticism
 Open-mindedness

Use evidence as much as possible to inform your intuition and experience —> promise of OB.
5. Identify the major behavioral science disciplines that contribute to OB.

Psychology — Science that seeks to measure, explain and sometimes change the behavior of humans
and other animals.
Social Psychology — Area of psychology that blends concepts from psychology and sociology and that
focuses on the influence of people on one another. Change has been a major area receiving
considerable investigation —> how to implement it and how to reduce barriers to its acceptance.
Sociology — Study of people in relation to their social environment or culture.
Anthropology — Study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities.

6. Demonstrate why there are few absolutes in OB.

Contingency Variables — Situational factors: variables that moderate the relationship between two or
more other variables.

7. Identify the challenges and opportunities managers have in applying OB concepts.

Responding to Globalization:

 Increased foreign assignments — Manage a workforce that is likely to be very different in

needs, aspirations and attitudes.
 Working with people from different cultures — Work effectively with people from different
cultures, you need to understand how their culture, geography and religion have shaped them
and how to adapt your management style to their differences.
 Coping with anticapitalism backlash — Management practices need to be modified to reflect
the values of the different countries in which an organization operates.
 Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labor — managers must deal with
the difficult task of balancing the interests of their organization with their responsibilities to the
communities in which they operate.

Managing workforce diversity — organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender,
age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and inclusion of other diverse groups.

 Embracing diversity — replace melting-pot assumption by one that recognizes and values
differences.
 Changing European demographics — age and gender.
 Implications — workforce diversity has implications for management practice —> they have to
shift their philosophy from treating everyone alike to recognizing differences and responding to
those differences in ways that ensure employee retention and greater productivity, while, at
the same time, not discriminating.

Improving quality and productivity — excess capacity translates into increased competition, and that
is forcing managers to reduce costs and, at the same time, improve their organization’s productivity
and the quality of the products and services they offer.
Improving customer service — management needs to create a customer-responsive culture.
Improving people skills — explain and predict the behavior of people at work.
Stimulation innovation and change — stimulate employees’ creativity and tolerance for change.
Coping with ‘temporariness’ — learn to live with flexibility, spontaneity and unpredictability.
Working in networked organizations — computerization, the Internet, and the ability to link
computers within organizations and between organizations have created a different workplace for
many employees, so managers need to develop new skills.

Helping Employees Balance Work-life Conflicts

 Creating a positive work environment — to realize a competitive advantage.

 Positive organizational scholarship — how organizations develop human strengths, foster
vitality and resilience and unlock potential. It challenges organizations to think about how to
exploit their employees’ strengths rather than dwell on their limitations.
 Improving ethical behaviors — members of organizations are increasingly finding themselves
facing ethical dilemmas, situations in which they are required to define right and wrong
conduct. Managers need to create an ethically healthy climate for their employees, where they
can do their work productively and confront a minimal degree of ambiguity regarding what
constitutes right and wrong.

8. Compare the three levels of analysis in this book’s OB model.

Model — abstraction of reality, a simplified representation of some real-world phenomenon. Each

level is constructed on the previous level.

Dependent Variable — key factor that you want to explain and that is affected by some other factor.

 Productivity — performance measure that includes effectiveness and efficiency. It implies a

concern for both effectiveness (achievement of goals) and efficiency (ratio of effective output to
the input required to achieve it)
 Absenteeism — failure to report to work. Organizations benefit when absenteeism is low.
 Turnover — voluntary and involuntary permanent withdrawal from an organization.
Reasonable levels of employee-initiated turnover facilitate organizational flexibility and
employee independence, and they can lessen the need for management-initiated layoffs.
 Deviant workplace behaviors — voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational
norms and, in so doing, threatens the well-being of the organization or its members. Managers
want to understand the source of workplace deviance in order to avoid a chaotic work
environment, and workplace deviance can also have a considerable financial impact.
 Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) — discretionary behaviors that is not part of an
employee’s formal job requirements, but that nevertheless promotes the effective functioning
of the organization.
 Job satisfaction — positive feeling about one’s job resulting from an evaluation of its
characteristics, represents attitude rather than behavior. Independent variables  presumed
cause of some changes in a dependent variable.
 Individual-level variables — people enter organizations with certain intact characteristics that
will influence their behavior at work. There is little management can do to alter them.
 Group-level variables — the behavior of people in groups is more than the sum total of all the
individuals acting in their own way. The complexity of our model is increased when we
acknowledge that people behave differently in groups or alone.
 Organization system-level variables — OB reaches its highest level of sophistication when we
add formal structure to our previous knowledge of individual and group behavior.