WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR?

NIDA KHURSHEED

CECOS UNIVERSITY OF IT & EMERGING SCIENCES

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Know how about organization and what managers do.

2. Basic functions of management.
3. Management Roles & Skills.
4. Effective Versus Successful Managerial Activities.
5. Definition of Organizational Behaviour (OB)
6. Replacing Intuition with Systematic Study
7. Contributing Disciplines to the OB Field
8. List the major challenges and opportunities for managers to use OB concepts.
9. Basic OB Model.
STUDY GUIDE & REFERENCE MATERIAL

 Organizational Behavior by Stephen P. Robbins and Timothy A. Judge (15 th Edition).

 Organizational Behavior by John R. Schermerhorn, James G. Hunt & Richard N. Osborn (7 th Edition)
 Research papers
WHAT MANAGERS DO?

 Managers (or administrators)

Individuals who achieve goals through other people

Managerial
ManagerialActivities
Activities
••Make
Makedecisions
decisions
••Allocate
Allocateresources
resources
••Direct
Directactivities
activitiesofofothers
othersto
to
attain
attaingoals
goals
WHERE MANAGERS WORK

 Organization

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.
PRIMARY FUNCTIONS OF MANAGEMENT
PRIMARY FUNCTIONS OF MANAGEMENT

 Planning

A process that includes defining goals, establishing strategy, and developing plans to coordinate activities.

 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.

 Leading

A function that includes motivating employees, directing others, selecting the most effective communication channels,
and resolving conflicts.

 Controlling

Monitoring activities to ensure they are being accomplished as planned and correcting any significant deviations.
MANAGEMENT ROLES

 In 1960s, Henry Mintzberg concluded that managers perform ten different, highly interrelated roles—or sets of
behaviors.

 These ten roles are primarily segregated into three main domains

(1) Interpersonal,
(2) Informational
(3) Decisional
INTERPERSONAL ROLES

Figurehead role:
 All managers are required to perform duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature.

Leadership role:
 Includes hiring, training, motivating, and disciplining employees.

Liaison role:
 Contacting others who provide the manager with information.
INFORMATIONAL ROLE:

Monitor Role:
 Collect information from outside organizations and institutions and talking with other people to learn of changes in
the public’s tastes, what competitors may be planning.

Disseminator role:
 Managers also act as a channel to transmit information to organizational members.

Spokesperson Role:
 Transmits information to outsiders on organization’s plans, policies, actions, and results; serves as expert on
organization’s industry.
DECISIONAL ROLES:

Entrepreneur role:
 Managers initiate and oversee new projects that will improve their organization’s performance.

Disturbance Handlers role:

 Managers take corrective action in response to unforeseen problems.

Resource Allocators:
 Managers are 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

 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.
EFFECTIVE VERSUS SUCCESSFUL MANAGERIAL ACTIVITIES
(FRED LUTHANS)

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

4. Networking
 Socializing, politicking, and interacting with others
sociology studies people in rela- tion to their social environment
or culture.
ENTER ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

 Organizational behavior (OB)

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
REPLACING INTUITION WITH SYSTEMATIC STUDY

Intuition
 A feeling not necessarily supported by research.
 The “gut feeling” explanation of behavior.

Systematic study
 looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects, and basing our conclusions on scientific
evidence—that is, on data gathered under controlled conditions and measured and interpreted in a
reasonably rigorous manner.
 Provides a means to predict behaviors.
CONTRIBUTING DISCIPLINES TO THE OB FIELD

 Psychology
The science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other animals.

 Social Psychology
An area within 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.

 Anthropology
The study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities.
CONTRIBUTING DISCIPLINES TO THE OB FIELD
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB

1. Responding to Economic Pressures

 Managing employees well when times are tough is just as hard as when times are good—if not more so. 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.

2. Responding to Globalization
 Organizations are no longer constrained by national borders. The world has become a global village. In the process, the
manager’s job has changed.
 Increased foreign assignments
 Working with people from different cultures
 Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labor
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB

3. Managing Workforce Diversity

 One of the most important challenges for organizations is adapting to people who are different
 Workforce diversity acknowledges a workforce of women and men; many racial and ethnic groups; individuals
with a variety of physical or psychological abilities; and people who differ in age and caste.
 Managing this diversity is a global concern.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB

4. Improving Customer Service

 The majority of employees in developed countries work in service jobs.
 Service jobs include technical support representatives, fast-food counter workers, sales clerks, waiters and
waitresses, nurses, automobile repair technicians, consultants, credit representatives, financial planners, and flight
attendants.
 The common characteristic of these jobs is substantial interaction with an organization’s customers.

“Empower staff to ‘use their best judgment’ in all customer service matters”
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB

5. Stimulating Innovation and Change

 Organizations must foster innovation and master the art of change
 Victory will go to the organizations that maintain their flexibility, continually improve their quality, and beat their
competition to the marketplace with a constant stream of innovative products and services
 Organization’s employees can be the impetus for innovation and change, or they can be a major stumbling block.
The challenge for managers is to stimulate their employees’ creativity and tolerance for change.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB

6. Copping with “Temporariness”

 Most managers and employees today work in a climate best characterized as “temporary.”
 Workers must continually update their knowledge and skills to perform new job requirements
 Today’s managers and employees must learn to cope with temporariness, flexibility, spontaneity, and
unpredictability.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB

7. Working in Networked Organizations

 Allow people to communicate and work together even though they may be thousands of miles apart.
 The manager’s job is different in a networked organization.
 Motivating and leading people and making collaborative decisions online requires different techniques than when
individuals are physically present in a single location.
 As more employees do their jobs by linking to others through networks, managers must develop new skills.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB
8. Helping Employees Balance Work–Life Conflicts
 Employees are increasingly complaining that the line between work and nonwork time has become blurred,
creating personal conflicts and stress.
 At the same time, today’s workplace presents opportunities for workers to create
and structure their own roles.
 Employees increasingly recognize that work
infringes on their
personal lives, and they’re not happy about it.
 Organizations that don’t help their people achieve
work–life balance will find it increasingly difficult to
attract and retain the most capable and
motivated employees.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB

9. Creating a Positive Work Environment

 Organizations are trying to realize a competitive advantage by fostering a positive work environment

Positive Organizational Behavior

 How organizations develop human strengths, foster vitality and resilience, and unlock potential.

Reflected best-self
 Asking employees to think about when they were at their “personal best” in order to understand how to achieve
their strengths.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR OB

10. Improving Ethical Behavior

Ethical dilemmas and ethical choices, in which employees are required to identify right and wrong conduct.
 Should they “blow the whistle” if they uncover illegal activities in their company?
 Do they follow orders with which they don’t personally agree?
 Should they give an inflated performance evaluation to an employee they like, knowing it could save that
employee’s job?
 Do they “play politics” to advance their career?

Determining the ethically correct way to behave is especially difficult in a global economy because different cultures
have different perspectives on certain ethical issues. writing and distributing codes of ethics to guide employees
through ethical dilemmas.
Organizations are offering seminars, workshops, and other training programs to try to improve ethical behaviors.
BASIC OB MODEL

Model
 An abstraction of reality.
 A simplified representation of some real-world phenomenon.
 It proposes three types of variables (inputs, processes, and outcomes) at three levels of analysis (individual, group,
and organizational).