HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN ORGANIZATIONS

COURSE OBJECTIVES: 1. At the end of the course, the student will be able to describe organizational behavior trends and discuss their effects on the workplace. 2. Identify specific ways in which organizations acquire, share and preserve knowledge; 3. Describe ways to match individual competencies to job requirement. 4. Explain how cognitions and emotions influence attitudes and behavior 5. Identify the conditions that require and the problems associated with emotional labor; 6. Define transactional and relational psychological contracts and explain how they vary across cultures and generational cohorts; 7. Explain why motivating employees has become more challenging in recent years; 8. Describe ways to improve reward effectiveness; 9. Summarize the structural approaches to managing conflict; 10. And discus the ethical issues in organizational change. LEARNING OBJECTIVES: 1. Define organizational behavior and organizations, and discuss the importance of this field of inquiry. 2. Compare and contrast the four current perspectives of organizational effectiveness, as well as the early goal attainment perspective. 3. Debate the organizational opportunities and challenges of globalization, workforce diversity, and emerging employment relationships. 4. Discuss the anchors on which organizational behavior knowledge is based. INTRODUCTION IN THE FIELD OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR Organizational Behavior (OB)- is defined as the study of what people think, feel and do in and around organizations. Organizational Behavior (OB): 1. It looks at employee behavior, decisions, perceptions and emotional responses. 2. It examines how individuals and teams in organizations relate to each other and to their counterparts in other organizations. 3. It encompasses the study of how organizations interact with their external environment, particularly in the context of employee behavior and decisions. Organization: -is defined as groups of people who work interdependently toward some purposes. They are not buildings or government-registered entities. -have existed for as long as people have worked together. Massive temples dating back to 3500 BC were constructed through the organized actions of multitudes of people. -Craftspeople and merchants in ancient Rome formed guilds, complete with elected managers. -More than 1000 years ago, Chinese factories were producing 125,000 tons of iron each year. -throughout history, organizations have consisted of people who communicate, coordinate, collaborate with each other to achieve common objectives. FEATURES OF ORGANIZATIONS 1. Organizations are collective entities - they consist of human beings (typically, but not necessarily, employees) who interact with each other in an organized way. 2. Organizations members have a collective sense of purpose.

HISTORICAL FOUNDATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR: 1940s Organizational behavior emerged as a distinct field around 1940s. 1776 Adam Smith advocated a new form of organizational structure based on the division of labor. 100 years later, German sociologist Max Weber wrote about rational organizations, the work ethics and charismatic leadership. Soon after, industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor proposed a new ways to organize employees and motivate them through goal setting and rewards. 1920s Australian Born Harvard Professor Elton Mayo and his colleagues establis hed the human relations school of management, which developed the study of employee attitudes and informal group dynamics in the workplace. Around 1920s Mary Parker Follet pioneered new ways of thinking about several OB topics, including constructive conflict, team dynamics, organizational democracy, power and leadership. A decade later, Chester Barnard wrote insightful views regarding individual behavior, motivation, communication, leadership and authority, and team dynamics in organizational settings. WHY STUDY ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR? -everyone in the organization needs to work with other people: 1. OB provides the knowledge and tools for working with and through others; -building a high performance team -motivating co-workers -handling workplace conflicts -influencing your boss -changing employee behavior 2. OB helps us make sense of and predict the world in which we live. 3. We use OB theories to question our personal beliefs and assumptions and to adopt to more accurate models of work behavior. 4. OB knowledge even helps us make sense of the broader world, not just what goes inside within the organization. PERSPECTIVES OF ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS Organizational Effectiveness - a broad concept represented by several perspectives, including the organizations fit with the external environment, Internal-subsystems configuration for high performance, emphasis on organizational learning and ability to satisfy the needs of key stakeholders. -ultimate dependent variable in organizational behavior. 1. Open systems perspective A perspective which holds that organizations depend on the external environment of resources, affect that environment through their output, and consist of internal subsystems that transform inputs to outputs. Different fit strategies: 1. Anticipating changes in the environment and fluidly reconfiguring their subsystems to become more consistent with that environment 2. Actively managing their external environment 3. Move into different environments if the current environment is too challenging.

Organizational Efficiency -also called productivity -the amount of outputs relative to inputs in the organizations transformation processes *Successful organizations require more than efficient transformation process, however, they also need to have a more adaptive and innovative transformation process. Organization-Environment Fit -organizations are effective when they maintain a good fit with their external environment. -good fit exists when the organization puts resources where they are most useful. Organizational Learning Perspective - also called knowledge management, - views knowledge as the main driver of competitive advantage. -specifically, organizations learning is founded on the idea that organizational effectiveness depends on the organizations capacity to acquire, share, use and store valuable knowledge. Organizational Learning - a perspective which holds that organizational effectiveness depends on the organizations capacity to acquire, share, use and store valuable knowledge. INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL : THE STOCK OF ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE - the organizational learning perspective views knowledge as a resource, and this stock of knowledge exits in 3 forms, collectively known as intellectual capital. Three (3) FORMS of Intellectual Capital: 1. Human Capital the knowledge, skills and abilities among employees that provide economic value to the organization. 2. Structural Capital (also called organizational capital) knowledge embedded in an organizations systems and structures. Ex. Documentation of work procedures and the physical lay-out of the production line. -also include the organizations finished products. 3. Relationship Capital the value derived from an organizations relationship with customers, sup FOUR ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING PROCESS: 1. Knowledge acquisition includes extracting information and ideas from the external environment, as well as through insight. 2. Knowledge sharing involves distributing knowledge to others across the organization, It is often equated with computer intranets and digital repositories of knowledge. 3. Knowledge use the competitive advantage of knowledge comes from applying it in ways that add value to the organization and its stakeholders. 4. Knowledge storage includes any means by which knowledge is held for lateral retrieval. Absorptive Capacity -the ability to recognize the value of new information, assimilate it, and use it for value added activities.

Organizational memory and unlearning: Corporate leaders need to recognize that they are the keepers of organizational memory. This unusual metaphor refers to the storage and preservation of intellectual capital. It includes knowledge that employees possess, as well as knowledge embedded in the organizations systems and structures. HIGH-PERFORMANCE WORK PRACTICES (HPWP) PERPECTIVE -similar to organizational learning, the HPWP perspective is founded on the belief that human capital- the knowledge, skills and abilities that employees carry around in their heads is an important source of competitive advantage for organizations. -the distinctive feature of the HPWP perspective is that it tries to identify a specific bundle of systems and structures that generate the most value for this human capital. High-Performance Work Practice (HPWP) - a perspective which holds the effective organizations incorporates several workplaces practices that leverage the potential of human capital. STAKEHOLDER PERSPECTIVE Stakeholders Individuals, organizations, or other entities that affect, or are affected by, the organization objectives and actions. VALUES, ETHICS AND CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY

Values relatively stable, evaluative beliefs that guide a persons preferences for outcomes or cou rses of action in a variety of situation. Ethics the study of moral principles or values that determine whether actions are right or wrong and outcomes are good or bad. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) -Organizational activities intended to benefit society and the environment beyond the firms immediate financial interests or legal obligations. CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES FOR ORGANIZATIONS: 1. Globalization economic, social and cultural connectivity with people in other parts of the world. 2. Increasing workforce diversity Surface-Level Diversity the observable demographic or physiological differences in people, such as their race, ethnicity, gender, age and physical disabilities. Deep Level Diversity differences in the psychological characteristics of employees, including personalities, beliefs, values, and attitudes. 3. Emerging employment relationships Work-Life Balance the degree to which a person minimizes conflict between work and non work demands. Virtual Work - work performed away from the traditional physical workplace by using information technology. Evidence-Based Management the practice of making decisions and taking actions based on research evidence.

ANCHORS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR KNOWLEDGE:

1. The Systematic Research Anchor Evidence-Based Management the practice of making decisions and taking actions based on research evidence. Reasons people have difficulty applying evidence-based management: a. Leaders and other decision makers are bombarded with so many ideas from newspapers, books, consultant reports and other sources that is a challenge to figure out which ones are based on good evidence. b. Good OB research is necessarily genetic, it is rarely described in the context of a specific problem in a specific organization. c. Consultants and popular book writers are rewarded for marketing their concepts and theories, not for testing to see if they actually work. d. People form perceptions and beliefs quickly and tend to ignore evidence that their beliefs are inaccurate. 2. The Multidisciplinary Anchor 3. The Contingency Anchor 4. The Multiple Levels of Analysis Anchor