Topic 1: Introduction to OB and MARS Flashcards
What are the Anchors of Organisational Behavior?
- Systemic Research: OB should study organisations using systemic research methods.
- Multidisciplinary: OB should import knowledge from other disciplines, not just create its own knowledge.
- Contingency: OB theory should recognise that the effects of actions often vary with the situation.
- Multiple levels of analysis: OB events should be understood from three levels of analysis: individual, team and organisation.
What perspectives do we consider in MGMT1135? Give brief descriptions:
- Open-Systems: Firms & their environments.
- Organisational Learning: Knowledge processes.
- Stakeholder: Managing the needs of stakeholders.
- High Performance Work Practices: Human capital utilization.
What is the Open-Systems perspective? Imagine the diagram
A perspective which holds that Organisations:
- Depend on the external environement for resources.
- Affect that environment through their output
- Consist of internal subsystems that transforms inputs into outputs.
In the Open-Systems perspective, how can a company be succesful?
By maintaining a good fit with its environment. It can do this by
1. Anticipating change and fluidly reconfiguring it’s systems to align with the needs of the external environment.
- Activily engaging the external environment, intefering with comeptition, marketing, lobbying for legislation, etc.
- Move to a new environment.
What is the Organisational Learning Perspective?
A perspective that holds that organisational effectiveness depends on the organisations capacity to utlize knowledge.
It analyses the stock (intellectual capital), and flow of knowledge (how knowledge is acquired, shared and used).
What are the three types of intellectual capital?
- Human Capital: Knowledge that people possess and generate
- Structural Capital: Knowledge captured in systems and structures
- Relationship Capital: Value derived from the relatinoship with customers, suppliers, etc.
What can firms to do maintain good organizational memory?
Store and preserve their intellectual capital by
- Keeping knowledgable employees
- Transferring knowledge to others
- Transferring human capital to structural capital
- Unlearning incorrect / bad knowledge
What is the high-performance work practices (HPWPs) perspective & it’s foundations.
Effective organisations incorporate several workplace practices that leverage the potential of human capital
Foundations:
- Believe that human capital is valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, nonsubstitutable
- Firms can develop and benefit from human capital through specific organisational practices
- Firms obtain the highest benefit when practices are bundled
What are some high performance work practises?
- Employee involvement and job autonomy (and their combination as self‐directed teams).
- Employee competence (training, selection, etc.)
- Performance‐based rewards
What is the stakeholder perspective?
That firms are entities which affect and are affected by multiple stakeholders, such as shareholders, employees, customers, unions, supplier, governments, etc, which must be managed for success.
What does the stakeholders perspective say about good leaders?
- A good leader must manage the needs of it’s diverse stakeholders appropriately - understanding that the firm will not have the resources to satisfy everyone.
- Leaders should rely on their personal and organisational values for guidance, which are clearly declared in a company statement.
What are the four factors in the MARS model? Show the diagram
- Motivation
- Ability
- Role Perception
- Situational Factors
What are the elements of motivation in the MARS model?
- Direction: the path along which effort is directed
- Intensity: The amount of effort
- Persistence: Continuing the effort for X amount of time.
What are the elements of ability in the MARS model?
- Natural Aptitude (Ex: high IQ)
- Learned Capabilities
related to:
- Compotencies; Skills, knowledge, aptitudes and other personal characteristics that lead to superior performance.
Explain the three elements of role perceptions
- understanding what tasks to perform
- understanding relative importance of tasks
- understanding pererred behaviors to accomplish tasks
