PART 1 INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR?

Learning Objectives

Demonstrate the importance of interpersonal skills in the workplace. Describe the managers functions, roles, and skills. Define organizational behavior (OB). Show the value of OB to systematic study. Identify the major behavioral science disciplines that contributes to OB. Demonstrate why few absolutes apply to OB. Identify the challenges and opportunities managers have in applying OB concepts. Compare three levels of analysis in this books OB model.

The Importance of Interpersonal Skills

Developing managers interpersonal skills helps organizations keep high-performing employees. Social relationship among co-workers and supervisors are strongly related to overall job satisfaction. Creating a pleasant workplace appears to make a good economic sense.

What Managers Do
Managers get things done through other people.

Management functions

Planning Leading Controlling Organizing

Management roles

Interpersonal roles Informational roles Decision roles

Management skills

Technical skills Human skills Conceptual skills

What Managers Do

Effective versus successful managers:

Luthans and his associates studied more than 450 managers. All engaged in four managerial activities:
1.

Traditional: Decision making, planning, and controlling.

2.

Communication: Exchanging routine information and processing paper work.

Human resource management: Motivating, disciplining, managing conflicts, staffing, and training. Networking: Socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders.

3.

4.

What Managers Do
The average manager spent 32 percent of his or her time in traditional management activities, 29 percent communicating, 20 percent in human resource management activities, and 19 percent networking.

What Managers Do

Enter Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior is 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 organizations effectiveness. Actions and attitudes of individuals and groups toward one another and toward the organization as a whole, and its effect on the organization's functioning and performance.

Complementing Intuition with Systematic Study

Intuition: Each of us is a student of behavior. We mostly judge people by watching their actions and try to interpret what we see. Unfortunately, the casual or common sense approach to reading others can often lead to erroneous predictions. Systematic study: Looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects, and drawing conclusions based on scientific evidence. Evidence-based management: The basing of managerial decisions on best available scientific evidence.

Disciplines that Contribute to the OB Field

Following fields have contributed to the field field of organizational behavior.

Psychology: The science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and animals. Social Psychology: An area of psychology that blends concepts from psychology and sociology and that focuses on the influence of people on one another. Sociology: The study of people in relation to their social environment or culture. Anthropology: The study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities.

There are Few Absolutes in OB

Unlike physical science (Chemistry, Astronomy, Physics) laws of Organizational Behavior are not consistent or they do not apply on every human being. Example: Two people often act very differently in the same situation. That doesnt mean that we cant offer reasonably accurate explanations of human behavior. It does mean that OB concepts must reflect situational, or contingency conditions.

Challenges and Opportunities for OB

Responding to economic pressures Responding to globalization

Increased foreign assignments Working with people from different cultures Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with low-cost labor

Managing work force diversity 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

Coming Attractions: Developing an OB Model

A model is an abstraction of reality, a simplified representation of some real world phenomenon. The dependent variables

Productivity Absenteeism Turnover Deviant workplace behavior Organizational citizenship behavior Job satisfaction Individual-level variables Group-level variables Organization system-level variable

The independent variables