What Is Organizational

Behavior?

Chapter 1
• Manager is an individual who achieves goals through other
people.”
• Organization is a consciously coordinated social unit, composed
of two or more people, that functions on a relatively continuously
basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals”

Managerial Activities
• Make decisions
• Allocate resources
• Direct activities of others to attain goals

Managers and
Organizations
The managerial functions can be categorized into four activities:
Planning, Organizing, Leading, and Controlling.
Planning: Defining goals, establishing strategy, and developing
plan. In short, determining what should be done.
Organizing: Arranging and distributing work among members of
the work group to accomplish the organization’s goals.
Leading: Guiding employees towards accomplishing organizational
objectives.
Controlling: Ensuring that actual performance is in line with
intended performance and taking corrective actions where
necessary.

What managers do
Henry Mintzberg identified three major roles of a manager
as follows:

Management Roles
 •• Management
Management Skills
Skills
Technical skills
The ability to apply specialized 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 analyze and diagnose complex
situations.
The figure below indicates the skills managers must have
and the degree of importance for each level of managers.

Managerial Skills
Do managers who move up the quickest in an organization
do the same activities and with same emphasis as managers
who do the best job?

Effective VS Successful
Managerial Activities
Allocation of Managerial
Activities by Time
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 effectives.

Organizational Behavior
OB is an applied science built on contributions from a
number of behavioral disciplines, mainly
 Psychology: The science that seeks to measure, explain,
and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other
animals
 Social Psychology: An area of psychology that blends
concepts from psychology and sociology and that focuses
on the influence of people on one another
 Sociology: The study of people in relation to their social
environment or culture

Disciplines that
Contribute to the OB field
Toward an OB Discipline
Contingency variables
Situational Factors: variable that moderate the relationship
between two or more other variables and improve the
correlation.

Few Absolutes in OB
Responding to economic pressure
Responding to globalization
• Increased foreign assignments
• Working with people from different cultures
• Coping with anti-capitalism backlash
• Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low cost labor
Managing workforce diversity
• Embracing diversity
• Changing U.S. demographics
• Implications for managers
• Recognizing and responding to differences

Challenges and
Opportunities for OB
Improving quality and productivity
• Quality management (QM)
• Process reengineering
Responding to the labor shortage
• Changing work force demographics
• Fewer skilled laborers
• Early retirements and older workers
Improving customer service
• Increased expectation of service quality
• Customer-responsive cultures

Challenges and
Opportunities of OB
• Improving people skills
• Empowering people
• Stimulating innovation and change
• Coping with “Temporariness”
• Working in networked organizations
• Helping employees balance work/life conflicts
• Improving ethical behavior

Challenges and
Opportunities of OB
Major Workforce
Diversity Categories
Basic OB Model
Inputs
• Personality
• Group structures
• Organizational culture
Process
• Actions that individuals, groups, and organizations engage in as a result of inputs and that lead to certain
outcomes
Outcomes
• Attitudes and stress
• Task performance
• Citizenship behavior
• Withdrawal behavior
• Group cohesion
• Group functioning
• Productivity
• Survival

Basic OB Model