Chapter 1:

Organizational behaviour:
Is The field of study devoted to understanding, explaining, and ultimately improving the attitudes
and behaviours of individuals and groups in organizations.

Human resource management:

Takes the theories and principals studied in Ob and explores the nuts and bolts applications of
those principles in organizations.

Strategic management:
Focuses on the product choices and industry characteristics that affect an organization’s
profitability

Classical management:
- Frederick Taylor
- Max Weber

- Put heavy emphasis on specialization, coordination and efficiency

Scientific management: (Taylor)

- Using scientific methods to design optimal and efficient work processes and tasks.
- Ex. careful observation, measurement, and experimentation.

Bureaucracy: (Max Weber)

Characteristics of bureaucracy:
1. The division of labour with a high level of technical specialisation
2. A strict chain of command (authority hierarchy) in which every member reported to
someone at a higher level.
3. A system of formal rules and procedures that ensure consistency, impartiality, and
impersonality throughout the organization
4. Decision making at the top of the organization.

● Productivity problems:
○ If and when they occurred, were likely viewed at the job level as the result of
design flaws, failures to implement specific processes, or inadequate working
conditions
■ Ex. not enough work breaks

Human relations movement:

- Field of study that recognizes that the psychological attributes of individual workers and
the social forces within work groups have important effects on work behaviours.

Focuses on:
 - Group values and norms
- Leadership
- Motivation
- Job satisfaction
- Organizational culture

● Productivity problems:
○ If and when they occurred, were likely viewed as the result of:
■ Worker alienation from organization
■ Failure of the work to satisfy important personal needs or goals
■ Low organizational commitment
■ Workgroup norms encouraging low rather than high performance
■ Little emphasis on the characteristics of formal organization.

Integrative model of Organizational Behaviour

Primary outcomes in studies of OB:

 - Job performance
- Organizational commitment

Employees:
- To perform their jobs well.
- To remain members of an organization they respect.

Managers:
- To maximize their job performance
- To retain these employees for a significant length of time

Individual characteristics and mechanisms:

Individual characteristics and mechanisms play a major role in job performance and
organizational commitment:

Personal characteristics:
- Personality
- Culture values
- Ability

Individual mechanisms:
- Job satisfaction
- Stress
- Motivation
- Trust, justice, and ethics
- Learning and decision making

Relational mechanisms:
- Relational mechanisms help to improve the individual mechanisms in an organization.
- These mechanisms include:
- Communication
- Team characteristics and processes
- Power, influence, and negotiation
- Leadership styles, and behaviours

How do we know what we know about Organizational behaviour:

There are several different ways of knowing things:
- Method of experience
- People hold firmly to some belief because it is consistent with their own
experience.
- Method of intuition
- People hold firmly to some belief because it “just stands to reason” it seems
obvious or self evident.
- Method of authority
 - People hold firmly to some belief because some respected official, agency, or
source has said it is so.
- Method of science
- People accept some belief because scientific studies have tended or replicated
that result using a series of samples, settings, and methods.

Scientists don't simply assume that their beliefs are accurate; they acknowledge that their
beliefs must be tested scientifically.

Theory:
- Defined as a collection of assertions - both verbal and symbolic - that specify how and
what variables are related.

Hypothesis:
Are written predictions that specify relationships between
variables.

How are correlations interpreted?

Correlation:
- A correlation, abbreviated r, describes the statistical
relationship between two variables.
- They can be positive or negative
- And range from 0 to 1
- “0” no relationship
- “1” perfect correlation

Casual inference:
Concluding that one variable really does cause another

To know if “one variable really does cause another” 3 things must be established:
1. That the two variables are correlated
2. The presumed cause precede the presumed effect in time
3. No alternative explanation exists for correlation.

Therefore very little can be learned from one study alone.

- After completing all those studies, you could look back on the results and create some
sort of average correlation across all of the studies. This process is called meta
analysis.

- More informed decisions come from running systematic experiments in smaller units of
an organization, making greater use of internal data.
- This includes hiring PHDs with relevant expertise, and pursuing collaborations
with academics.
- Such practices form the foundation for the use of analytics as a tool for
management.

Resource based view:

● Rare and inimitable resources help firms maintain a competitive advantage (p. 10)

● Rare: in short supply

● Inimitable: incapable of being imitated or copied
● Resources: financial (e.g., revenue), physical (e.g., buildings), and human (e.g.,
knowledge, ability, wisdom)
○ Factors such as history, socially complex resources, and numerous small
decisions make human resources inimitable.

Scientific management uses scientific methods to design optimal and efficient work progresses
and tasks.

Weber focused on bureaucracy and thought about the entire organization rather than specific
processes.

The organizational mechanism that reflects how units within an organization link to and
communicate with other units is called organizational structure.

several different practices are important, along with a long-term commitment to improving those
practices. This premise can be summarized with what might be called the Rule of One-Eighth

According to the resource-based view, the collective store of useful experience, wisdom, and
knowledge possessed by an organization's people is referred to as history