Organizational behavior_3

Managing People and Organizations

Managerial Perspectives on Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior is not a designated function or area. Rather, it is a perspective or set of tools that all managers can use to carry out their jobs more effectively.

A knowledge of organizational behavior helps managers to better:

– Recognize why others in the organization behave as they do.

– Interact with colleagues, peers, and coworkers.

– Understand individual needs, motives, behaviors, and feelings.

– Interact with suppliers, customers, and competitors.

Figure 2.1
Basic Managerial Functions

Planning

–The process of determining the organization’s desired future position and the best means to get there.

Organizing

–The process of designing jobs, grouping jobs into units, and establishing patterns of authority between jobs and units.

Leading

–The process of getting the organization’s members to work together toward the organization’s goals.

Controlling

–The process of monitoring and correcting the actions of the organization and its members to keep them directed toward their goals.

Basic Managerial Roles

Interpersonal Roles

–Are primarily social in nature in which the manager’s main task is to relate to other people in certain ways.

Informational Roles

–Involve some aspect of information processing.

Decision-Making Roles

–Involve some aspect of decision-making.

Table 2.1 Important Managerial Roles

Critical Managerial Skills

Technical Skills

–Those skills necessary to accomplish specific tasks within the organization.

Interpersonal Skills

–Equip a manager with the ability to communicate with, understand, and motivate individuals and groups.

Conceptual Skills

–Involve a manager’s ability to think in the abstract. A manager with strong conceptual skills is able to see the “big picture.”

Diagnostic Skills

–Allow managers to better understand cause-and-effect relationships and recognize the optimal solution to problems.

Figure 2.2 Managerial Skills at Different Organizational Levels

Organizational Challenges

1) Workforce Expansion and Reduction

–
a) Downsizing

•Is the process of purposely becoming smaller by reducing the
size of the workforce or by shedding entire
divisions or businesses.

–b) Expansion

•Is the process of growing an organization by expanding the workforce.

•During boom periods like the late 1990s, downsizing gave way in many sectors of the economy to growth and expansion.

2) The New Workplace

–
a) Workforce Diversity

•The term “diversity” refers to differences among people.

•Diversity may be reflected along numerous dimensions, but most managers tend to focus on age, gender, ethnicity, and physical abilities and disabilities.

–
b) Characteristics of the New Workforce

• In coping with the new workforce, managers face three main challenges:

– Create an environment attractive to today’s worker.

– Providing new and different incentives to keep people motivated and interested in their work.

– Build enough flexibility into the organization to accommodate an ever-changing set of lifestyles and preferences.

3) Organizational Change

–Simply put, an organization that fails to monitor its environment and to change to keep pace with that environment is doomed to failure.

4) Information Technology (IT)

–a) Specific forms of hardware such as cellular phones and fax machines have made it easier than ever for managers to communicate with each other.

–b) At the same time, these innovations have increased the work pace for managers, cut into their time for thoughtful contemplation of decisions, and increased the amount of information they must process.

5) New Ways of Organizing

–a) Many organizations are seeking greater flexibility and the ability to respond more quickly to their environment by adopting flat structures.

–
b) The increased use of work teams also goes hand-in-hand with this new approach to organizing.

Environmental Challenges

1) Competitive Strategy

–a) A firm’s competitive strategy explains how it intends to compete with other firms in the same industry.

–b) Most firms adopt one of three competitive strategies:

•(i) Differentiation

–Firm makes its products and services “different” from others in the marketplace.

•(ii) Cost Leadership

–Firm works aggressively to push its costs as low as possible.

•(iii) Focus

–Firm targets products or services to meet the unique needs of a specific customer group.

2) Globalization

–a) The globalization trend started soon after World War II.

–b) Managing in a global economy poses many different challenges and opportunities.

–c) An important consideration is how behavioral processes vary widely across cultural and national boundaries.

3) Ethics and Social Responsibility

–a) Individual ethics are that individual’s beliefs about what is right or wrong or good or bad.

–b) An organization’s social responsibility is its obligation to protect and contribute to the social environment in which it functions.

4) Quality and Productivity

–a) More and more organizations are using quality as a basis for competition.

–b) Improving quality tends to increase productivity because making higher-quality products generally results in less waste and rework.

5) Manufacturing and Service Technology

–a) Managing manufacturing and service operations requires managers to keep abreast of new forms of technology and to make appropriate investments in new equipment.

–b) The service sector has become much more important.

Managing for Effectiveness

1) Three Basic Levels of Outcomes That Determine Organizational Effectiveness

–a) Individual Behaviors

•Result from a person’s participation in an organization.

–b) Individual Attitudes

•Involve levels of job satisfaction or dissatisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational involvement.

–c) Stress

•Stress is becoming an increasingly more important topic in organizational studies.

Organizational Behavior_2

The Meaning of Organizational Behavior

Organizational Behavior (OB)

–The study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and of the organization itself.

The Importance of Organizational Behavior

–People as organizations

–People as resources

–People as people

Figure 1.1 The Nature of Organizational Behavior

The Historical Roots of Organizational Behavior

Scientific Management Era (early 1900s)

–Frederick W. Taylor

•Studied the efficiency and productivity of individual workers.

•Systematically studied jobs to eliminate soldiering.

•Promoted standardized job performance methods.

•Implemented piece-rate based incentive pay systems.

•Taylor’s innovations boosted productivity markedly.

Other Pioneers

–Frank and Lillian Gilbreth

–Henry Gantt

–Harrington Emerson

Scientific Management

Positive Attributes

–
Facilitated job specialization and mass production.

–Demonstrated to managers their role in enhancing performance and productivity.

Negative Attributes

–
Labor opposed scientific management because its explicit goal was to get more output from workers.

–Critics argued that Taylor’s methods and ideas would dehumanize the workplace and reduce workers to little more than drones.

–Theorists later argued that Taylor’s views of employee motivation were inadequate and narrow.

The Historical Roots of Organizational Behavior

Classical Organization Theory

–
This perspective was concerned with structuring organizations effectively.

–Whereas scientific management studied how individual workers could be made more efficient, organization theory focused on how a large number of workers and managers could be organized most effectively into an overall structure.

Major Contributors to Classical Organization Theory

Henri Fayol

–French executive and engineer.

Lyndall Urwick

–British executive.

Max Weber

–German Sociologist.

–Proposed a “bureaucratic” form of structure based on logic, rationality, and efficiency that was assumed to be the most efficient (universal) approach to structuring for all organizations.

Table 1.1 Elements of Weber’s Ideal Bureaucracy

The Emergence of Organizational Behavior

1) Legacy of Scientific Management and Classical Organizational Theory

–Rationality, efficiency, and standardization were the central themes of both scientific management and classic organization theory.

–The roles of individuals and groups in organizations were either ignored or given only minimal attention.

2) The Hawthorne Studies (1927–1932)

–Focused attention on the role of human behavior in the workplace.

–Led directly to the emergence of organizational behavior as a field of study.

The Hawthorne Studies
1927–1932

Involved two studies conducted by Elton Mayo at Western Electric’s plant near Chicago:

–
The effects of lighting on productivity.

–The effectiveness of a piecework incentive system.

The studies yielded surprising results:

–
In the lighting study, productivity went up because the workers were singled out for special treatment.

–
In the incentive system experiment, social pressures caused the workers to vary their work rates.

–
As a result of the Hawthorne studies, researchers concluded that the human element in the workplace was more important than previously thought.

3) The Human Relations Movement

–People respond primarily to their social environment.

–Motivation depends on social, not economic needs.

–Satisfied employees work harder than dissatisfied employees.

–Douglas McGregor – Theory X and Theory Y

–Abraham Maslow – Hierarchy of needs

Toward Organizational Behavior: The Value of People

–Organizational behavior reached maturity as a field of study in the late 1950s .

Table 1.2 Theory X and Theory Y

Contemporary Organizational Behavior

Characteristics of the Field

–
An Interdisciplinary Focus

•Synthesizes psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, engineering, and medicine.

–A Descriptive Nature

•OB’s primary goal is describing the relationship between behavioral variables (e.g., pay satisfaction and job performance).

•
OB cannot predict with certainty due to:

–Immaturity of the OB field.

–The complexities of studying human behavior.

–Lack of universally established definitions and measures.

Contextual Perspectives on Organizational Behavior

1) The Systems Perspective

–A system is an interrelated set of elements that function as a whole.

2) The Systems Approach

–Provides a framework for understanding how the elements of an organization interact among themselves and with their environment.

3) The Universal Perspective

–Suggests that whenever a manager encounters a problem, a universal approach exists that will lead to the desired outcome.

4) The Contingency Perspective

–Suggests that whenever a manager encounters a problem, the approach to use is contingent on other variables.

Figure 1.3 The Systems Approach to Organizations

5) Interactionalism: People and Situations

–
First presented in terms of interactional psychology, this view assumes that individual behavior results from a continuous and multidirectional interaction between the characteristics of the person and the characteristics of the situation.

–
Interactionalism attempts to explain how people select, interpret, and change various situations

Figure 1.4 Universal versus Contingency Approach