Organizational Behavior

Lecture 01

Topic: Context of OB

Dated: 17.10.2020
The Importance of Interpersonal Skills
• Understanding OB helps determine manager
effectiveness
▫ Technical and quantitative skills are important
▫ But leadership and communication skills are
CRITICAL
• Organizational benefits of skilled managers
▫ Lower turnover of quality employees
▫ Higher quality applications for recruitment
▫ Better financial performance
What Managers Do
• They get things done through other people.
• Management Activities:
▫ Make decisions
▫ Allocate resources
▫ Direct activities of others to attain goals
• Work in an 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.
Management Functions

Plan Organize

Managers

Lead Control
Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles
• Discovered ten managerial roles

• Separated into three groups:

▫ Interpersonal
▫ Informational
▫ Decisional
Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles:
Interpersonal
Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles:
Informational
Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles:
Decisional
Essential 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
Luthans’ Study of Managerial
Activities
• Four types of managerial activity:
▫ Traditional Management
 Decision making, planning, and controlling
▫ Communication
 Exchanging routine information and processing paperwork
▫ Human Resource Management
 Motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, staffing and
training
▫ Networking
 Socializing, politicking, and interacting with others
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.
The two are complementary means of predicting behavior.

Intuition and Systematic Study

• Gut feelings
Intuition • Individual observation
• Common sense

• Looks at relationships
Systematic • Scientific evidence
Study • Predicts behaviors
An Outgrowth of Systematic Study…
Evidence-Based Management (EBM)
Basing managerial decisions on the best available scientific
evidence.

Pose a Search for best Apply relevant

managerial available information to
question evidence case

Must think like scientists:

Managers Should Use All Three
Approaches
The trick is to know when to go with your gut – Jack Welsh

• Intuition is often based on inaccurate

information
• Faddism is prevalent in management
• Systematic study can be time consuming
• Use evidence as much as possible to inform your
intuition and experience. That is the promise of
OB.
Contributing Disciplines
Many behavioral sciences
have contributed to the
development of
Psychology
Organizational
Behavior
Social
Psychology

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

•Unit of Analysis:
▫ Individual
•Contributions to OB:
▫ Learning, motivation, personality, emotions, perception
▫ Training, leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction
▫ Individual decision making, performance appraisal attitude
measurement
▫ Employee selection, work design, and work stress
Social Psychology
An area within psychology that blends concepts
from psychology and sociology and that focuses on
the influence of people on one another.

•Unit of Analysis:
▫ Group
•Contributions to OB:
▫ Behavioral change
▫ Attitude change
▫ Communication
▫ Group processes
▫ Group decision making
Sociology
• Contributions to OB:
▫ Group dynamics
▫ Work teams
▫ Communication
The study of people in relation
▫ Power to their fellow human beings.
▫ Conflict
▫ Intergroup behavior
▫ Formal organization theory
▫ Organizational technology
▫ Organizational change
▫ Organizational culture
Anthropology
• Contributions to OB:
▫ Organizational culture
▫ Organizational environment
The study of societies to
▫ Comparative values learn about human
▫ Comparative attitudes beings and their
▫ Cross-cultural analysis activities.
Challenges and Opportunities for
OB
• Responding to Economic Pressures
• Responding to Globalization
• Managing Workforce Diversity
• Improving Quality and Productivity
• Improving Customer Service
• Improving People Skills
• Stimulating Innovation and Change
• Coping with “Temporariness”
• Working in Networked Organizations
• Helping Employees Balance Work-Life Conflicts
• Creating a Positive Work Environment
• Improving Ethical Behavior
Responding to Economic Pressures
• What do you do during difficult economic times?
▫ Effective management is critical during hard
economic times.
▫ Managers need to handle difficult activities such
as firing employees, motivating employees to do
more with less and working through the stress
employees feel when they are worrying about their
future.
▫ OB focuses on issues such as stress, decision
making, and coping during difficult times.
Responding to Globalization
• Increased foreign assignments

• Working with people from different cultures

• Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with

low-cost labor
Managing Workforce Diversity
Disability
Domestic
Gender
Partners

Race Age

National
Religion
Origin
Managing Workforce Diversity
• The people in organizations are becoming more
heterogeneous demographically
▫ Embracing diversity
▫ Changing U.S. demographics
▫ Changing management philosophy
▫ Recognizing and responding to differences
Developing an OB Model
• A model is an abstraction of reality – a
simplified representation of some real-world
phenomenon.
• Our OB model has three levels of analysis
▫ Each level is constructed on the prior level
Interesting OB Dependent
Variables
• Productivity
▫ Transforming inputs to outputs at lowest cost. Includes the
concepts of effectiveness (achievement of goals) and efficiency
(meeting goals at a low cost).
• Absenteeism
▫ Failure to report to work – a huge cost to employers.
• Turnover
▫ Voluntary and involuntary permanent withdrawal from an
organization.
• Deviant Workplace Behavior
▫ Voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational norms
and thereby threatens the well-being of the organization and/or
any of its members.
More Interesting OB Dependent
Variables
• Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB)
▫ Discretionary behavior that is not part of an
employee’s formal job requirements, but that
nevertheless promotes the effective functioning of
the organization.
• Job Satisfaction
▫ A general attitude (not a behavior) toward one’s
job; a positive feeling of one's job resulting from
an evaluation of its characteristics.
The Independent Variables
• The independent variable (X) can be at any of these three levels in
this model:
• Individual
▫ Biographical characteristics, personality and emotions, values
and attitudes, ability, perception, motivation, individual learning,
and individual decision making
• Group
▫ Communication, group decision making, leadership and trust,
group structure, conflict, power and politics, and work teams
• Organization System
▫ Organizational culture, human resource policies and practices,
and organizational structure and design
THANK YOU