Chapter 1 - What is OB? Flashcards
What is Organizational Behavior?
A field of study devoted to understanding, explaining, and ultimately improving the attitudes and behaviors of individuals and groups in organizations.
What is Human Resource Management?
Taking the theories and principles studied in OB and exploring the “nuts-and-bolts” applications of those principles in organizations.
Difference between OB and HR?
OB may explore the relationship between learning and job performance, while HR might examine the best ways to structure training programs to promote employee learning.
Strategic Management?
focuses on the product choices and industry characteristics that affect and organization’s profitability. A strategic management study might examine the relationship between firm diversification (adding a new product) and firm profitability.
What are the Two Primary Individual Outcomes of interest to OB researchers?
Job Performance and Organizational Commitment
What are the 5 Individual Mechanisms that directly affect job performance and organizational commitment?
job satisfaction, stress, motivation, “trust, Justice, and Ethics”, “Learning and decision making”
Job Satisfaction
what employees feel when thinking about their jobs and doing day-to-day work
Stress
reflects employees’ psychological responses to job demands that tax or exceed their capacities.
Motivation
captures the energetic forces that drive employees’ work effort.
Trust, Justice ,and Ethics
reflects the degree to which employees feel that their company does business with fairness, honesty, and integrity.
Learning and Decision Making
deals with how employees gain job knowledge and how they use that knowledge to make accurate judgements on the job
Personality and cultural values
reflect the various traits and tendencies that describe how people act, with commonly studied traits including extraversion, conscientiousness, and collectivism.
Ability
cognitive abilities (verbal, quantitative, etc.) emotional skills, and physical abilities that employees bring to a job.
Inimitable
resource that can’t be imitated
History
collective pool of experience, wisdom, and knowledge that benefits the organization.
Numerous Small Decisions
captures the idea that people make many small decisions day in and day out
Socially Complex Resources
culture, teamwork, trust, and reputation
Rule of One-Eighth
at best 12% of organizations will actually do what is required to build profits by putting people first.
Method of Experience
people hold a belief because it is consistent with their own experience and observations.
Method of Intuition
People hold firmly to a belief because it “just stands to reason”
Method of Authority
people hold firmly to some belief because some respected official, agency, or source has said it is so.
Method of Science
people accept a belief because scientific studies have tended to replicate that result using a serious of samples, settings, and methods.
Theory
collection of assertions
Hypotheses
written predictions that specify relationships between variables
What is the possible range of correlation “r” in an experiment?
-1 to 1, with 0 meaning no correlation.
What is the “r” range of strong correlation in OB?
.5+
What is the correlation range “r” that is considered moderate in OB?
.3-.5
What is a weak “r” in OB?
0-.1
3 steps to assume a Causal Inference
1) 2 variables are correlated, 2) presumed cause precedes the presumed effect in time, 3) There are no alternative explanations
meta-analysis
taking all of the correlations found in studies of a particular relationship and calculating a weighted average
evidence-based management
perspective that argues that scientific findings should form the foundation for management education, much as they do for medical education.
What focuses on the “Why” aspect of the actions of individuals and groups in an organization?
Organizational Behavior (OB)
