Organizational Behavior

EE5 Fall-19
What is Organizational Behavior and
Why it is Important?
 Organization
A group of people regularly working together to
achieve common goal.
 Organizational behavior (OB)

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 organization’s
effectiveness.
The study of how people ,Groups and structures affect
organizations’ behavior.

The study of human behavior in Organization

Components of Organizational Behavior
Understanding
organizational
behavior
requires studying

Individuals in
Organizations

Group and Team

Processes

Organizational
Processes
Disciplines That Contribute to the OB Field

Organizational behavior is an applied

behavioral science built on contributions from
a number of behavioral disciplines, mainly
psychology and social psychology, sociology,
,anthropology and Political Science.
Psychology’s contributions have been mainly
at the individual or micro level of analysis,
while the other disciplines have contributed to
our understanding of macro concepts such as
group processes and organization.
Disciplines That Contribute to the OB Field

Many behavioral sciences

have contributed to the
development of
Organizational
Behavior Psychology

Social
Psychology

Sociology Anthropology
Psychology
The science that seeks to measure, explain, and
sometimes change the behavior of humans and other
animals.

•Unit of Analysis:
Individual ----(Micro Level)
•Contributions to OB:
– Learning, motivation, personality, emotions, perception
– Training, leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction
– Individual decision making, performance appraisal attitude
measurement
– Employee selection, work design, and work stress
Social Psychology
An area within psychology that blends concepts from
psychology and sociology and that focuses on the influence
of people on one another.
One major study area is change —how to implement it and
how to reduce barriers to its acceptance.
Unit of Analysis:
Group
Contributions to OB:
– Behavioral change
– Attitude change
– Communication
– Group processes
– Group decision making
 Sociology
The study of people in relation to their fellow human
beings.
Unit of Analysis: -
Group & Organizational System
• Contributions to OB:
– Group dynamics – Formal organization theory
– Work teams – Organizational technology
– Communication – Organizational change
– Power – Organizational culture
– Conflict
– Intergroup behavior
 Anthropology
The study of societies to learn about human beings
and their activities.

Unit of Analysis:
Organizational System and Group

• Contributions to OB: – Comparative values

– Organizational culture – Comparative attitudes
– Organizational environment – Cross-cultural analysis
Summary : Bases of Organizational Behavior

Psychology: The science or study of individual human behavior

Social Psychology: Studies influences of people on one

another.

Sociology: The study of group human behavior .

Anthropology: Study of the human race, and culture

Political science : the study of the behavior of individuals and groups within a political
environment.
Contributing Disciplines to the OB Field

Micro: Psychology
The Individual

Social Psychology

Sociology
Macro:
Groups &
Organizations Anthropology
Disciplines That Contribute to the OB Field
 The Study of Organizational Behavior

Psychology

Individual

Social Psychology

Organizational
Sociology Group Behavior

Anthropology

Organization
 Challenges and Opportunities for OB
• Responding to Economic Pressures
• Responding to Globalization
• Managing Workforce Diversity
• Improving Quality and Productivity
• 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
Responding to Economic Pressures
• What do you do during difficult
economic times?
– Effective management is critical
during hard economic times.
– Managers need to handle difficult
activities such as firing employees,
motivating employees to do more
with less and working through the
stress employees feel when they are
worrying about their future.
– OB focuses on issues such as stress,
decision making, and coping during
difficult times.
Responding to Globalization
Organizations are no longer constrained by
national borders. The world has become a
global village. In the process, the manager’s
job has changed.
Increased foreign assignments.
Working with people from different cultures.
Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with
low-cost labor.
Managing Workforce Diversity
The people in organizations are becoming
more heterogeneous demographically
– Embracing diversity and find ways to manage it
effectively.
– Changing management philosophy
– Recognizing and responding to differences

Disability
Domestic
Gender
Partners

Race Age

National
Religion
Origin
 Improving Customer Service
The majority of the workforce in developed nations
works in service jobs. These jobs require substantial
interaction with the organization’s customers: poor
service experiences can lead to organizational failure.
• Managers must create customer-responsive cultures whose
members are:
• Friendly and courteous
• Accessible
• Knowledgeable
• Prompt in responding to customer needs
• Willing to do, what is necessary to please the customer
Improving Quality and Productivity
• Quality management (QM)
– The constant attainment of customer satisfaction through
the continuous improvement of all organizational
processes.
– Requires employees to rethink what they do and become
more involved in workplace decisions.
• Process reengineering
– Asks managers to reconsider how work would be done and
their organization structured if they were starting over.
– Instead of making incremental changes in processes,
reengineering involves evaluating every process in terms
of its contribution.
Improving People Skills
Studying OB allows managers to be
better at explaining and predicting the
behavior of people at work. They can
design more motivational jobs, apply
techniques to improve listening skills,
and can create more effective teams.
Stimulating Innovation and Change

• To survive, modern businesses must

adapt to new market conditions and
foster innovation.
• OB theories and concepts help managers
to stimulate employee creativity and
tolerance for change.
Coping with “Temporariness”
Organizations must be fast and flexible if they are to
survive. Because of this need for constant change,
almost everything an organization is temporary. Job
descriptions, job skills, and even jobs themselves have
all become temporary. Successful firms, managers, and
workers must be able to adapt, to invest in continuous
learning, and to live with flexibility, spontaneity, and
unpredictability.
Working in Networked Organizations
Networked organizations allow people to
communicate and work together even though
they may be thousands of miles apart.
Independent contractors can telecommute via
computer to workplaces around the globe and
change employers as the demand for their
services changes. Software programmers, graphic
designers, systems analysts, technical writers,
photo researchers, book and media editors, and
medical transcribers are just a few examples of
people who can work from home or other non-
office locations.
Helping Employees Balance Work/Life Conflicts

– Work scheduling is becoming far more flexible than it

was in the past. This change allows more freedom for
workers to adjust their work life around their personal
life, but many people now find the line between work
and their personal lives so blurred that they seem to
be always at work.
• This feeling that work is inescapable creates
stress and increases personal conflicts. OB can
help by giving managers the tools they need to
help reduce that stress by redesigning the work
itself.
Creating a Positive Work Environment
A real growth area in OB research is positive
organizational scholarship (also called positive
organizational behavior ), which studies how
organizations develop human strengths, foster
vitality and resilience, and unlock potential.
Although positive organizational scholarship does
not deny the value of the Negative (such as
critical feedback), it does challenge researchers to
look at OB through a new lens and pushes
organizations to exploit employees’ strengths
rather than dwell on their limitations.
Improving Ethical Behavior
• In a highly competitive environment, the pressure
to “bend the rules” in order to produce becomes
very strong. Unfortunately, no standard of
ethics is universally accepted, especially when a
global perspective is taken.
• Managers need to create an ethically healthy
climate in which employees can work
productively and confront a minimal degree of
ambiguity regarding what constitutes right and
wrong behaviors.
Developing an OB Model
• A model is an abstraction of reality .
• A simplified representation of some real-world
phenomenon.
• Our OB model has three levels of analysis
– Each level is constructed on the prior level
A Basic OB Model
 Few Absolutes in OB
• Impossible to make simple and accurate
generalizations
• Human beings are complex and diverse
• OB concepts must reflect situational
conditions: contingency variables

Condition Behavior
Input “A”
“C” “B”

1-31
Few Absolutes in OB
Situational factors that make the main relationship
between two variables change—e.g., the relationship may
hold for one condition but not another.

Contingency Independent Dependent

Variable (Z) Variable (X) Variable (Y)

In American Boss Gives

Understood as
“Thumbs Up”
Culture Complimenting
Sign

In Iranian or Boss Gives Understood as

Australian “Thumbs Up” Insulting - “Up
Sign Yours!”
Cultures
Types of Study Variables
Independent (X)
– The presumed cause of the
change in the dependent
variable (Y).
– This is the variable that OB
researchers manipulate to
observe the changes in Y.
X Y
Dependent (Y)
– This is the response to X (the
independent variable).
– It is what the OB researchers
want to predict or explain.
– The interesting variable!
Predictive Ability
OB Independent Variables
The independent variable (X) can be at any of these three
levels in this model:
•Individual
– Biographical characteristics, personality and emotions, values
and attitudes, ability, perception, motivation, individual
learning, and individual decision making
•Group
– Communication, group decision making, leadership and trust,
group structure, conflict, power and politics, and work teams
•Organization System
– Organizational culture, human resource policies and practices,
and organizational structure and design
OB Dependent Variables (y)
• Productivity
– Transforming inputs to outputs at lowest cost. Includes the
concepts of effectiveness (achievement of goals) and efficiency
(meeting goals at a low cost).
• Absenteeism
– Failure to report to work – a huge cost to employers.
• Turnover
– Voluntary and involuntary permanent withdrawal from an
organization.
• Deviant Workplace Behavior
– Voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational norms
and thereby threatens the well-being of the organization and/or
any of its members.
OB Dependent Variables
• Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB)
– Discretionary behavior that is not part of an employee’s
formal job requirements, but that nevertheless promotes
the effective functioning of the organization.
• Job Satisfaction
– A general attitude (not a behavior) toward one’s job; a
positive feeling of one's job resulting from an evaluation of
its characteristics.
OB Model

Dependent
Variables (Y)
Three Levels

Independent
Variables (X)
The End