Organizational Behavior, 13th, 2009
Robins, professor of SD state university
(15th, 2012),(16th, 2014), (17th, 2016)
content structure:
- Introduction
- individual: diversity, attitudes and job satisfaction, emotions and moods, personality and values, perception and decision making, motivation concepts and application
- group: foundations, understanding, communications, leadership, power and politics, conflicts and negotiation, organization structure
- organization system: organizational culture, HR policies and practices, organizational change and stress management.
1 what’s organizational behavior
In today’s increasingly competitive and demanding workplace, managers can’t succeed on their technical skills alone. They also have to have good people skills. This book has been written to help both managers and potential managers develop those people skills.
Organizations exist to achieve goals, someone has to define those goals and the means for achieving the: management is that someone. there are 4 functions:
- planning: define an organization’s goals, establish an overall strategy for achieving those goals, develop a comprehensive set of plans to integrate and coordinate activities
- organizing: determine what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to ge grouped, who reports to whom, and where decisions are to be made.
- leading: motivate employees, direct the activities of others, select the most effective communication channels, resolve conflicts among members.
- controlling: monitor the organization’s performance,compare with the previously set goals, get the organization back on track.
Management has 3 roles: interpersonal(including symbolic head,leader, liaison), informational, decisional
Management has 3 skills: technical, human, conceptual (identify problem, develop alternative solutions to correct these problems).
Management has 4 activities:
- traditional management(decision making, planning, controlling),
- communication (exchanging routing information),
- human resource management(motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, staffing, and training)
- networking (socializing, politicking, interact with outsiders)
Average manager spends equal time to every activity. Effective managers (performance-oriented) spend 44% on communication and 26% on human resource, but successful manager(promotion-oriented) spend 48% on networking and politics, 28% on communication, 13% on traditional management, 11% on human resource.
Whether or not you’ve explicitly thought about it before, you’ve been reading people almost all your life. You watch what others do and try to explain to yourself why they have engaged in their behavior and predict what they might do under different sets of conditions. You can improve your predictive ability by your intuition and a more systematic approach.
You have a lot fo preconceived notions that you accept as facts. While OB is based on a number of behavioral disciplines, such as psychology, social psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
James March, Professor of OB at Stanford
God gave all the easy problems to the physicists.
OB was developed by applying general concepts to a particular situation, person, or group. OB scholars would avoid stating that everyone likes complex and challenging work. why? because not everyone likes a challenging job. Some people prefer the routine over the varied or the simple over the complex. A job that is appealing to one person may not be to another.
melting-pot assumption: different people would somehow automatically want to assimilate. It is being replaced by one that recognizes anv values differences.
3 attitude and job satisfaction
attitudes have 3 components: cognition, affect, and behavior.
cognitive dissonance by Eeon Festinger: any incompatibility an individual might perceive between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes. Any form of inconsistency is uncomfortable and that individuals will attempt to reduce the dissonance and the discomfort.:
- change attitude
- change behavior
- develop a rationalization for the discrepancy
e.g. smoke. They can deny, brainwash themselves by articulating the benefit. Or they can quit their job because the dissonance is too great.
No one can completely avoid dissonance. The desire to reduce dissonance depends on:
- the importance of the elements creating it: fundamental values, self-interest, identification with individual
- how well he can control the element
- the rewards of the dissonance
Dissonance are more likely to occur when social pressures to behave in certain ways hold exceptional power.
Altitude-Behavior relationship is likely to be much more stronger if an attitude refers to something with which the individual has direct personal experience. Asking college students with no significant work experience how they would respond to working for an authoritarian supervisor is far less likely to predict actual behavior than asking that same question of employees who have actually worked for such individual.
Job Involvement/psychological empowerment. Good leaders empower their employees by involving them in decisions, making them feel their work is important, and giving them discretion to do their own thing.
4 personality and values
Stephen Schwarzman , CEO of Blackstone, might be described as relatively narcissistic. He says his mission in life is to inflict pain and kill off his rivals. “I want war, not a series of skirmishes.”
Personality is the sum total of ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts with others. Managers use personality tests in the hiring process or managing process.
Self-report surveys work well but the person may fake good to create a good impression. And the mood also affect the accuracy. Observer-rating surveys are a better predictor of success on the job.
Research in personality development has tended to better support the importance of heredity over the environment.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(MBTI) is the most widely used personality-assessment instrument. 100 questions.
- extravered/introverted (E/I)
- sensing/intuitive(S/N)
- thinking/feeling(T/F)
- judging/perceiving(J/P)
I may be ISTP
In spite of its popularity, most of the evidence suggests MBTI is not a valid measure of personality. One problem is its dichotomy division. Anyway, MBTI can be a valuable tool for increasing self-awareness and providing career guidance. But the results tend to be unrelated to job performance.
big 5
- conscientious: very careful about doing what you are supposed to do. responsible and dependable, an indicator of job performance
- emotional stability: positive and optimistic in their thinking and experience fewer negative emotions.
- extravert: experience more positive emotions and more freely express these feelings, perform better in jobs require significant interpersonal interaction. More socially dominate and a strong predictor of leadership. The downside is more impulsive than introverts. engage in risky behavior.
- openness. more creative, more comfortable with ambiguity and change, cope better with organizational change and more adaptable in changing contexts.
- agreeable: better liked, do better in interpersonally oriented jobs such as customer service. more compliant and rule abiding, do better in school. However, it is associated with lower level of carrer success, especially earnings. They may because they are poorer negotiators; they are so concerned with pleasing others that they often don’t negotiate as much for themselves as do others.
core self-evaluation
self-perfective: whether they like or dislike themselves, see themselves as capable and effective, in control of their environment. One study of Fortune 500 CEO showed that many are overconfident. But the point is, if we decide we can’t do something, we won’t try, and not doing it only reinforces our self-doubts.
Machiavellianism
Kuzi makes no apologies for the aggressive tactics he’s used to propel his career upward. “I’m prepared to do whatever I have to do to get ahead”.
pragmatic, maintains emotional distance, and believes that ends can justify means. “if it works, use it”.
manipulate more, win more, less persuaded, and persuade others more.
high Machs flourish in 3 situational factors:
- interact face-to-face with others rather than indirectly
- situation has a minimal number of rules and regulations
- low Machs are distracted by emotional involvement with details irrelevant to winning
Whether high Machs make good employees depend on the type of job. In jobs that require bargaining skills(labor negotiation), offer substantial rewards for winning(commissioned sales), high Machs will be productive.
Narcissism
- likes to be the center of attention.
- tend to talk down to those who threaten them, treating others as if they were inferior.
- selfish and exploitive, carry the attitude that others exist for their benefit.
self-monitoring
- individual’s ability to adjust behavior to external, situational factors.
- show considerable adaptability in adjusting their behavior to external situational factors.
- highly sensitive to external cues and can behave differently in different situations.
- capable of presenting striking contradiction between public persona and private self.
- receive better performance rating, more likely to emerge as leader, more mobile in their career.
low self-monitor is politically inept, unable to adjust her behavior to fit changing situations. tend to display their true disposition and attitudes in every situation.
risk-taking
donald trump
Type A personality
aggressive, always moving/eating rapidly, feel impatient with the rate of most event, can’t cope with leisure time. obsessed with numbers. operate under moderate to high level of stress.
Type A do better than type B in job interviews because they are more likely to be judged as having desirable traits such as high drive, competence, aggressiveness, and success motivation.
proactive personality
identify opportunities, show initiative, take action, and persevere until meaningful change occurs. They create positive change in their environment, regardless of or even in spite of constraints or obstacles.
values
although values and personality are related, they’re not the same. Values are often very specific and describe belief systems rather than behavioral tendencies.
8 emotions and moods
emotional labor:
- felt emotion: individual’s actual emotions
- displayed emotions: the organization requires workers to show and considers appropriate for a given job. They are not innate; they are learned.
- surface acting: hiding one’s inner feelings and forgoing emotional expressions in response to display rules. deal with displayed emotion.
- deep acting: trying to modify one’s true inner feelings based on display rules. deal with felt emotion.
Surface acting is more stressful to employees than deep acting because it entails feigning one’s true emotions.
salary: (cognitive + emotion) > (cognitive-emotion) > (-cognitive-emotion) > (cognitive + emotion)
