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Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 1
EXPANDED CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. The Importance of Interpersonal Skills
skills play in determining a manager’s effectiveness.
D. Incorporating OB principles into the workplace can yield many important organizational
outcomes.
E. Better financial performance.
F. Lower turnover of quality employees.
turnover.
H. Greater social responsibility awareness.
I. Companies with reputations as good places to work—such as Genentech, the Boston
employees.
J. A recent national study of the U.S. workforce found that:
satisfaction.
2. Employees who know how to relate to their managers well, with supportive dialogue
workplace satisfaction.
3. Increasing the OB element in organizations can foster social responsibility awareness.
K. Managers cannot succeed on technical skills alone, they must have people skills.
II. Management and OB
A. Definitions
2. Organization: A consciously coordinated social unit composed of two or more
of goals.
B. Management Functions
1. All managers perform five management functions: planning, organizing,
commanding, coordinating, and controlling. Modern management scholars have
condensed these functions to four: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.
2. Planning requires a manager to:
a. Define goals (organizational, departmental, worker levels).
b. Establish an overall strategy for achieving those goals.
c. Develop a comprehensive hierarchy of plans to integrate and coordinate activities.
3. Organizing requires a manager to:
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 2
d. Determine who reports to whom.
e. Determine where decisions are to be made (centralized/decentralized).
4. Leading requires a manager to:
a. Motivate employees.
b. Direct the activities of others.
c. Select the most effective communication channels.
d. Resolve conflicts among members.
5. Controlling requires a manager to:
a. Monitor the organization’s performance.
c. Correct significant deviations.
C. Management Roles (Exhibit 1-1)
1. Introduction
b. The ten roles can be grouped as being primarily concerned with interpersonal
2. Interpersonal Roles
may be individuals or groups inside or outside the organization.
3. Informational Roles
own.
b. Disseminator—a conduit to transmit information to organizational members.
c. Spokesperson—represent the organization to outsiders.
4. Decisional Roles
a. Entrepreneur—managers initiate and oversee new projects that will improve their
organization’s performance.
b. Disturbance handlers—take corrective action in response to unforeseen problems.
c. Resource allocators—responsible for allocating human, physical, and monetary
resources.
d. Negotiator role—discuss issues and bargains with other units to gain advantages
for their own unit.
D. Management Skills
1. Introduction
a. Researchers have identified a number of skills that differentiate effective from
ineffective managers.
2. Technical Skills
a. The ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise. All jobs require some
specialized expertise, and many people develop their technical skills on the job.
3. Human Skills
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 3
a. Ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people, both individually
and in groups.
b. Many people are technically proficient but interpersonally incompetent.
4. Conceptual Skills
a. The mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations.
b. Decision making, for example, requires managers to spot problems, identify
alternatives that can correct them, evaluate those alternatives, and select the best
one.
E. Effective Versus Successful Managerial Activities (Exhibit 1-2)
1. Fred Luthans and his associates asked: Do managers who move up most quickly in an
necessarily promoted the fastest.
a. Luthans and his associates studied more than 450 managers. They found that all
managers engage in four managerial activities.
1) Traditional management
a.) Decision making, planning, and controlling.
activity.
2) Communication
a.) Exchanging routine information and processing paperwork.
b.) The average manager spent 29 percent of his or her time performing this
activity.
3) Human resource management
activity.
4) Networking
a.) Socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders.
b.) The average manager spent 19 percent of his or her time performing this
activity.
1-2)
a. Networking made the largest relative contribution to success.
b. Human resource management activities made the least relative contribution.
c. Effective managers—defined as quality and quantity of their performance, as well
as commitment to employees:
1) Communication made the largest relative contribution.
2) Networking made the least relative contribution.
play in getting ahead in organizations.
3. Organizational Behavior: OB is a field of study that investigates the impact that
individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations for the
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 4
effectiveness.
F. Organizational behavior is a field of study.
1. OB studies three determinants of behavior in organizations: individuals, groups, and
structure.
2. OB applies the knowledge gained about individuals, groups, and the effect of
attitude development and perception, change processes, conflict and negotiation, and
work design.
III. Complementing Intuition with Systematic Study
A. Introduction
predictions.
B. You can improve your predictive ability by replacing your intuitive opinions with a more
systematic approach.
C. The systematic approach used in this book will uncover important facts and relationships
and will provide a base from which more accurate predictions of behavior can be made.
D. Systematic Study of Behavior
2. Looks at relationships.
3. Attempts to attribute causes.
4. Bases our conclusions on scientific evidence.
E. Evidence-Based Management (EBM)
1. Complements systematic study.
F. Intuition
1. Systematic study and EBM add to intuition, or those “gut feelings” about “why I do
what I do” and “what makes others tick.”
2. If we make all decisions with intuition or gut instinct, we’re likely working with
incomplete information.
what we think we know.
4. We find a similar problem in chasing the business and popular media for management
wisdom. Information—like making an investment decision with only half the data.
G. Big Data
1. Big data—the extensive use of statistical compilation and analysis—didn’t become
amounts of information.
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 5
2. Background: It’s difficult to believe now, but not long ago companies treated online
shopping as a virtual point-of-sale experience: shoppers browsed websites
6. New trends: While accessibility to data increases organizations’ ability to predict
human behavioral trends, the use of big data for understanding, helping, and
managing people is relatively new but holds promise.
8. Limitations: As technological capabilities for handling big data have increased, so
surveillance instruments.
9. What do people think about big data when they are the source of the data?
Organizations using big data run the risk of offending the very people they are trying
to influence: employees and customers.
10. We must keep in mind that big data will always be limited in predicting behavior,
curtailing risk, and preventing catastrophes.
11. In contrast to the replicable results we can obtain in the sciences through big data
analytics, human behavior is often capricious and predicated on innumerable
variables. Otherwise, our decision making would have been taken over by artificial
intelligence by now!
12. We’re not advising that you throw your intuition, or all the business press, out the
window.
13. What we are advising is to use evidence as much as possible to inform your intuition
and experience.
IV. Disciplines That Contribute to the OB Field
A. Introduction (Exhibit 1-3)
1. Organizational behavior is an applied behavioral science that is built upon
contributions from a number of behavioral disciplines.
2. The predominant areas are psychology, social psychology, sociology, and
anthropology.
3. Exhibit 1-3 overviews the major contributions to the study of organizational behavior.
B. Psychology
1. Psychology is the science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the
behavior of humans and other animals.
2. Early industrial/organizational psychologists concerned themselves with problems of
fatigue, boredom, and other factors relevant to working conditions that could impede
efficient work performance.
3. More recently, their contributions have been expanded to include learning,
perception, personality, emotions, training, leadership effectiveness, needs and
motivational forces, job satisfaction, decision making processes, performance
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 6
appraisals, attitude measurement, employee selection techniques, work design, and
job stress.
C. Social Psychology
1. Social psychology blends the concepts of psychology and sociology.
2. It focuses on the influence of people on one another.
3. Major area—how to implement it and how to reduce barriers to its acceptance.
D. Sociology
1. Sociologists study the social system in which individuals fill their roles; that is,
sociology studies people in relation to their fellow human beings.
2. Their greatest contribution to OB is through their study of groups in organizations,
particularly formal and complex organizations.
E. Anthropology
1. Anthropology is the study of societies to learn about human beings and their
activities.
2. Anthropologists work on cultures and environments; for instance, they have helped us
understand differences in fundamental values, attitudes, and behaviors among people
in different countries and within different organizations.
V. There Are Few Absolutes in OB
A. Introduction
1. There are few, if any, simple and universal principles that explain organizational
behavior.
2. Human beings are complex. Because they are not alike, our ability to make simple,
accurate, and sweeping generalizations is limited.
3. That does not mean, of course, that we cannot offer reasonably accurate explanations
of human behavior or make valid predictions. It does mean, however, that OB
concepts must reflect situational, or contingency, conditions.
B. Contingency variables—situational factors are variables that moderate the relationship
between the independent and dependent variables.
C. Using general concepts and then altering their application to the particular situation
developed the science of OB.
D. Organizational behavior theories mirror the subject matter with which they deal.
VI. Challenges and Opportunities for OB
A. Introduction (Exhibit 1-4)
1. There are many challenges and opportunities today for managers to use OB concepts.
2. Exhibit 1-4 details some of the types of options individuals may find offered to them
B. Economic Pressure
1. Deep and prolonged recession in 2008 that spread world-wide.
2. In economic tough times, effective management is an asset.
3. During these times, the difference between good and bad management can be the
difference between profit and loss.
forefront.
C. Continuing Globalization
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 7
1. Increased Foreign Assignments
2. Working with People From Different Cultures
a. Even in your own country, you’ll find yourself working with bosses, peers, and
other employees born and raised in different cultures.
b. Management practices need to be modified to reflect the values of the different
countries in which an organization operates.
communities in which they operate.
4. Adapting to Differing Cultural and Regulatory Norms
a. “Going global” for a business is not as simple as typing in an overseas e-mail
address, shipping goods off to a foreign port, or building facilities in other
countries.
D. Workforce Demographics
1. People adapt to survive, and OB studies the way those adaptations affect individuals’
behavior.
2. As students of OB, we can investigate what factors lead employees to make various
choices and how their experiences affect their perceptions of their workplaces.
E. Workforce Diversity
1. Workforce diversity is one of the most important and broad-based challenges
currently facing organizations.
2. Workforce diversity acknowledges a workforce of women and men; many racial and
ethnic groups; individuals with a variety of physical or psychological abilities; and
F. Customer Service
1. Service employees include technical support reps, fast food counter workers, waiters,
nurses, financial planners, and flight attendants.
2. Employee attitudes and behavior are associated with customer satisfaction.
G. People Skills
1. People skills are essential to managerial effectiveness.
behavior in given situations.
H. Networked Organizations
1. Networked organizations are becoming more pronounced.
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 8
I. Social Media
1. Social media is a difficult issue for today’s manager, presenting both a challenge and
an opportunity for OB. For instance, how much should HR look into a candidate’s
social media presence?
2. Once employees are on the job, many organizations have policies about accessing
J. Employee Well-Being at Work
1. Employees are increasingly complaining that the line between work and non-work
has become blurred, creating conflict and stress.
2. Communication technology has provided a vehicle for working at any time or any
place.
3. Employees are working longer hours per week.
parents, and friends.
5. Balancing work and life demands now surpasses job security as an employee priority.
K. Positive Work Environment
1. Positive organizational scholarship or behavior studies what is ‘good’ about
organizations.
L. Ethical Behavior
1. Ethical dilemmas and ethical choices are situations in which an individual is
required to define right and wrong conduct.
2. Good ethical behavior is not so easily defined.
3. Organizations are distributing codes of ethics to guide employees through ethical
dilemmas.
A. An Overview
1. A model is an abstraction of reality, a simplified representation of some real-world
phenomenon. (Exhibit 1-5)
2. It proposes three types of variables (inputs, processes, and outcomes) at three levels
of analysis (individual, group, and organizational).
processes leading to outcomes.
4. Notice that the model also shows that outcomes can influence inputs in the future.
B. Inputs
1. Inputs are the variables like personality, group structure, and organizational culture
that lead to processes.
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 9
4. For example, individual diversity characteristics, personality, and values are shaped
by a combination of an individual’s genetic inheritance and childhood environment.
5. Group structure, roles, and team responsibilities are typically assigned immediately
before or after a group is formed.
customs and norms.
C. Processes
1. If inputs are like the nouns in organizational behavior, processes are like verbs.
2. Processes are actions that individuals, groups, and organizations engage in as a
result of inputs and that lead to certain outcomes.
conflict and negotiation.
4. Finally, at the organizational level, processes include human resource management
and change practices.
D. Outcomes
1. Outcomes are the key variables that you want to explain or predict, and that are
affected by some other variables.
E. Attitudes and stress
1. Employee attitudes are the evaluations employees make, ranging from positive to
negative, about objects, people, or events.
2. For example, the statement, “I really think my job is great,” is a positive job
environmental pressures.
4. Some people might think that influencing employee attitudes and stress are purely
soft stuff, and not the business of serious managers, but as we will show, attitudes
often have behavioral consequences that directly relate to organizational
effectiveness.
begun to support it.
6. Ample evidence shows that employees who are more satisfied and treated fairly are
more willing to engage in the above-and-beyond citizenship behavior so vital in the
contemporary business environment.
F.Task performance
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 10
3. The task performance of a teacher would be the level of education that students
obtain.
4. The task performance of a consultant might be measured by the timeliness and
G. Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB)
1. The discretionary behavior that is not part of an employee’s formal job
requirements, and that contributes to the psychological and social environment of
the workplace, is called organizational citizenship behavior.
occasional work-related impositions and nuisances.
4. Organizations want and need employees who will do things that aren’t in any job
description.
5. Evidence indicates organizations that have such employees outperform those that
don’t.
H. Withdrawal behavior
1. We’ve already mentioned behavior that goes above and beyond task requirements,
but what about behavior that in some way is below task requirements?
2. Withdrawal behavior is the set of actions that employees take to separate
themselves from the organization.
attend meetings to absenteeism and turnover.
4. Employee withdrawal can have a very negative effect on an organization.
a. The cost of employee turnover alone has been estimated to run into the
thousands of dollars, even for entry-level positions.
5. Absenteeism also costs organizations significant amounts of money and time every
year.
unscheduled absences is 8.7 percent of payroll.
b. In Sweden, an average of 10 percent of the country’s workforce is on sick leave
at any given time.
6. It’s obviously difficult for an organization to operate smoothly and attain its
objectives if employees fail to report to their jobs.
Chapter 1 What Is Organizational Behavior? Page 11
considerably more than a disruption; it can drastically reduce the quality of
output or even shut down the facility.
b. Levels of absenteeism beyond the normal range have a direct impact on any
organization’s effectiveness and efficiency.
average is around 3 percent per month.
b. If the “right” people are leaving the organization—the marginal and
submarginal employees—turnover can actually be positive.
c. It can create an opportunity to replace an underperforming individual with
someone who has higher skills or motivation, open up increased opportunities
emotions and moods, and negative interactions with coworkers and supervisors.
I. Group cohesion
1. Although many outcomes in our model can be conceptualized as individual level
phenomena, some relate to how groups operate.
another at work.
a. In other words, a cohesive group is one that sticks together.
3. When employees trust one another, seek common goals, and work together to
achieve these common ends, the group is cohesive; when employees are divided
among themselves in terms of what they want to achieve and have little loyalty to
one another, the group is not cohesive.
have a common purpose.
5. Companies attempt to increase cohesion in a variety of ways ranging from brief
icebreaker sessions to social events like picnics, parties, and outdoor
adventure-team retreats.
6. Throughout the book, we will try to assess whether these specific efforts are likely
to result in increases in group cohesiveness.
