Chapter 1 - Introduction to Organizational Behaviour Flashcards
What is organizational behaviour (OB)?
A field of study devoted to understanding, explaining, and ultimately improving the attitudes and the behaviours of individuals and groups in organizations.
What are organizations?
Social inventions that accomplish common goals through group effort.
What two management fields is OB often contrasted with?
Human Resource Management: Takes the theories and principles 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 affecting an organization’s profitability.
What disciplines are OB theories and concepts drawn from?
Industrial and organizational psychology, for job performance, and individual characteristics.
Social psychology, for satisfaction, emotions, and team processes.
Sociology, for team characteristics and organizational structure.
Anthropology, for organizational culture.
Economics, for motivation, learning, and decision-making.
What are the two primary individual outcomes of interest in organizational behavior?
-Job performance
-Organizational commitment
What individual mechanisms directly affect job performance and organizational commitment?
-Job satisfaction: What employees feel when thinking about their job and doing their day-to-day work.
-Stress: Psychological responses to job demands that tax or exceed employees’ capabilities.
-Motivation: Energetic forces driving employees’ work effort.
-Trust, justice, and ethics: Degree to which employees feel that their company conducts business fairly, honestly, and with integrity.
-Learning and decision-making: How employees gain job knowledge and use that knowledge to make accurate job judgments.
What individual characteristics lay beneath the individual mechanisms?
-Personality and cultural values: Various traits and tendencies that describe how people act.
-Ability: Cognitive, emotional, and physical skills that employees bring to a job.
What group characteristics lay beneath the individual mechanisms?
-Team characteristics and diversity: Team formation, staffing, composition, inter-reliance of members;
-Team processes and communication: Team behaviour (coordination, conflict, cohesion).
What are ‘OB resources’?
Knowledge, ability, wisdom of the workforce, as well as the image, culture, goodwill of the organization.
What is the resource-based view?
A perspective that argues for the importance of OB for a company’s bottom-line profitability.
What does the value of resources depend on?
-Degree of rarity: It is difficult to find good people;
-Inimitability: It is difficult to imitate good people.
Why is inimitability challenging?
-History: Collective pool of experience, wisdom, and knowledge benefiting the organization;
-Numerous small decisions: People make many small decisions, often not visible and observable to competitors;
-Socially-complex resources: Culture, teamwork, trust, and reputation are not always clear in how they come to develop.
Why are firms that are good at OB more profitable?
-Their people are their competitive advantage, being a rare and inimitable resource;
-There is lower turnover, but greater productivity, market value, and profitability;
-Firm survival is contingent on the high value of OB, and the use of OB practices.
What is the Rule of One-Eight?
Explains why OB is such a challenge!
Effective management of OB requires a belief that several different practices are important, and must be committed to long-term, ultimately to continuously improve those practices.
1/2 of organizations don’t believe the connection between management methodology and earned profits; 1/2 of those that do see the connection only make a single change to solve their problems, lacking a comprehensive approach; only 1/2 of those that do make comprehensive changes will persist their practices long enough to actually derive economic benefits.
What are different ways of knowing things?
-Method of experience: Holding strongly to a belief, as it is consistent with one’s own experiences and observations;
-Method of intuition: Holding strongly to a belief, because it seems obvious or self-evident;
-Method of authority: Holding strongly to a belief, because some respected official, agency, or source has said it is so;
-Method of science: Holding strongly to a belief, because scientific studies have tended to replicate that result using a series of samples, settings, and methods.
