Organizational Behavior
Chapter 1
Introduction to the filed of Organizational behavioral

The field of organizational behavior

Organizational behavior (OB): the study of what people think, feel, and do in and around organizations.
They study this topic at multiple levels of analysis:

• The individual
• The team
• The organization

Organizations: groups of people who work interdependently toward some purpose.
Collective entities. Humans who interact with each other in an organized way.
Requires some minimal level of:

• Communication
• Coordination
• Collaboration

Members have a collective sense of purpose. This purpose isn’t always well defined and agreed on.

Historical foundation s of organizational behavior

OB emerged as a distinct field throughout the 1940s.
During that decade, a few researchers began describing their research as organizational.
Experts on other fields have been studying organizations for many centuries.

Why study organizational behavior?

Comprehend and predict workplace events

The field of organizational behavior uses scientific research to discover systematic relationships, which give us a valuable foundation for comprehending organizational life.
It helps us predict and anticipate future events so we can get along with others, achieve our goals, and minimize unnecessary career risks.

Adopt more accurate personal theories

Influence organizational events

Contemporary developments facing organizations

Organizations are deeply affected by the external environment. They need to maintain a good organization-environment fit by anticipating and adjusting to changes in society.

Technological change

Technological change has always been a disruptive force in organizations, as well as in society.
Innovations dramatically boost productivity, but also usually displace employees and render obsolete entire occupational groups.
Not even top-level executives are immune to the effects of these transformational innovations.

Other technologies potentially improve productivity but more profoundly alter our relationships and patterns of behavior with coworkers, clients, and suppliers.

Other technologies aim to improve health and well-being.

Information technology is one of the most significant forms of technological change in recent times.
Some OB experts argue that information technology gives employees a stronger voice through direct communication with executives and broader distribution of their opinions to coworkers and beyond.
It also created challenges.

• Tethering people to their jobs for longer hours
• Reducing their attention spans at work
• Increasing techno-stress

At a macro level, information technology has reconfigured entire organizations by integrating suppliers and other external

Organizational Behavior
Chapter 3
Perceiving ourselves and others in organizations

Self-concept: how we perceive ourselves

Self-concept: an individual’s self-beliefs and self-evaluations.
Defined at three levels:

• Individual
• Relational
• Collective

Specifically, we view ourselves in terms of our personal traits (individual), connections to friends and coworkers (relational)and memberships in entities (collective).

Self-concept complexity, consistency and clarity

An individual’s self-concept can be described by three characteristics

• Complexity
  The number of distinct and important roles or identities that people perceive about themselves
  Self-expansion: increase complexity
  Also the separation of those identities
  Although everyone has multiple selves, only some of those identities dominate their attention at one time.
• Consistency
  High consistency exist when the individual’s identities require similar personality traits, values, and other tributes.
  Depends on how closely the person’s identities require personal attributes that are similar to his or her actual attributes.
• Clarity
  The degree to which a person’s self-concept is clear, confidently defined and stable.
  When we are confident about who we are, can describe our important identities to others, and provide the same description of ourselves across time.
  Clarity increases with age and is clearer when a person’s multiple selves have higher consistency.

Effects of self-concept characteristics on well-being and behavior

People tend to have better psychological well-being when they have fairly distinct multiple selves (complexity), that are well established (clarity) and require similar personal attributes that are compatible with the individual’s character (consistency).

Self-concept complexity protects our self-esteem when some roles are threatened or damaged.
People tend to have better well-being when their multiple selves are in harmony with each other with the individual’s personality and values.
Also increases with clarity.

Self-concept has opposing effects on individual behavior and performance.
Employees with complex identities tend to have more adaptive decision making and performance.

Self-concept complexity often produces more diverse social networks.

Highly complex self-concepts require more effort to maintain and juggle, which can be stressful.
Self-concept clarity tends to improve performance and its considered vital for leadership roles.
Provides a clearer path forward.
Feel less threatened by interpersonal conflict.
But: inflexibility

Self-enhancement

A person’s inherent motivation to have a positive self-concept (and to others perceive him or her favorably) such as being competent, attractive, lucky, ethical and important.
Observed in many ways

• Individuals rate themselves

Organizational Behavior
Chapter 5
Foundations of employee motivation

Motivation: the forces within a person that affect his or her direction, intensity and persistence of voluntary behavior.

Employee engagement

Employee engagement: individual emotional and cognitive motivation, particularly a focused, intense, persistent, and purposive effort toward work-related goals.
An emotional involvement in, commitment to, and satisfaction with the work.
Also high level of absorption in the work and self-efficacy.

Most employees aren’t very engaged.
Actively disengaged employees tend to be disruptive at work, not just disconnected from work.

Employee drives and needs

Drives: hardwired characteristics of the brain that correct deficiencies or maintain an internal equilibrium by producing emotions to energize individuals. (primary needs).
Innate and universal.
The starting point of motivation because they generate emotions.

Needs: goal-directed forces that people experience.
Motivational forces of emotions channeled toward particular goals to correct deficiencies or imbalances.
The emotions we eventually become conscious aware of.

Drives and emotions → needs → decisions and behavior

Individual differences in needs

Everyone has the same drives.
People develop different intensities of needs in a particular situation.

Self-concepts, social norms and past experience amplify or suppress emotions, thereby resulting in stronger or weaker needs.

• Need can be ‘learned’ to some extent.
• Regulate a person’s motivated decisions and behavior.

Maslow’s needs hierarchy theory

A motivation theory of needs arranged in a hierarchy, whereby people are motivated to fulfill a higher need as a lower one becomes gratified.
Five categories, which Maslow called primary needs.

• Self-actualization
• Esteem
• Belongingness
• Safety
• Physiological

And

• The desire to know
• The desire for aesthetic beauty

Two drives that did not fit within the hierarchy

Humans are motivated by several primary needs (drives) at the same time, but the strongest source of motivation is the lowest unsatisfied need.
But people have an ongoing need for self-actualization, it is never really fulfilled.
It is a growth need, it continues to develop even when temporarily satiated.

But
Maslow’s need hierarchy theory has been dismissed by most motivation experts.

• Not a order adequately to the hierarchy
• Need fulfillment seems to last for a briefer period of time
• People have different needs hierarchies

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation:

Organizational Behavior
Chapter 7
Decision making and creativity

Rational choice decision making

Decision making: the conscious process of making choices among alternatives with the intention of moving toward some desired state of affairs.

Rational choice decision making selects the best alternative by calculating the probability that various outcomes will occur from the choices and the expected satisfaction from each of those outcomes.
Rely primarily on two pieces of information:

• The probability that each outcome will occur
• The valence or expected satisfaction of each outcome

Rational choice decision-making process

Steps:

1. To identify the problem or recognize an opportunity
2. Choose the best decision process
3. Discover or develop possible choices
4. Select the choice with the highest value
5. Implement the selected choice
6. Evaluate the selected choice

Programmed decisions: follow standard operating procedures.
They have been resolved in the past, so the optimal solution has already been identified and documented.

Non-programmed decisions: require all steps in he decision model because the problems are new, complex, or ill-defined.

Identifying problems and opportunities

Problems with problem identification

Five of the most widely recognized problems:

Solution-focused problems

Some decision makers describe the problems as a veiled solution.
They fail to fully diagnose the underlying causes that need to be addressed.

Decisive leadership

Many leaders announce problems or opportunities before having a change to logically asses the situation. The result is often a misguided effort to solve an ill-defined problem or resources wasted on a poorly identified opportunity.

Stakeholder framing

Stakeholders provide (or hide) information in ways that makes the decision maker see the situation as a problem, opportunity, or steady sailing.

Perceptual defense

People sometimes fail to become aware of problems because they block out bad news as a coping mechanism.

Mental models

Decision makers are victims of their own problem framing due to existing mental models.
Mental models are visual or relational images in our mind of the external world.

Identifying problems and opportunities more effectively

One way to improve the process is by becoming aware of the five problem identification biases.
Another way is to create a norm of ‘divine discontent’. Decision makers with this mindset are never satisfied with current conditions, so they more actively search for problems and opportunities.
Or discussing the situation with colleagues and clients.

Organizational Behavior
Chapter 9
Communicating in teams and organizations

Communication: the process by which information is transmitted and understood between two or more people.

The importance of communication

• Coordination
• In addition to coordination, communication is critical for organizational learning. It is the means through which knowledge enters the organization and is distributed to employees.
• A function of communication is decision making.
• It also changes behavior.
• Communication supports employee well-being.

A model of communication

Communication flows through one or more channels (also called media) between the sender and receiver.
The sender forms a message and encodes it.
The encoded message is transmitted to the intended receiver.
The receiver senses and decodes the incoming message into something meaningful.

In most situations, the sender looks for evidence that the other person received and understood the transmitted message.
Communication is not a free-flowing conduit, the transmission of meaning from one person to another is hampered by noise.

Influences on effective encoding and decoding

Effective communication depends on the sender’s and receiver’s ability, motivation, role clarity, and situational support to efficiently and accurately encode and decode information.

Four main factors influence the effectiveness of the encoding-decoding process

• The sender en receiver encode and decode more effectively when they have similar ‘codebooks’
• Improves with experience
• When the sender and receiver are skilled and motivated to use the selected communication channel(s)
• The process depends on the sender’s and receiver’s shared mental models of the communication context

Communication channels

Two main types of channels

• Verbal
• Nonverbal

Problems with email and other digital message channels

Four top complaints:

• Poor communication of emotions
• Less politeness and respectfulness
  Flaming: messages that convey strong negative emotions
  Individuals can post digital messages before their emotions subside.
  Digital messages are impersonal
• Cumbersome medium for ambiguous, complex, and novel situations
• Contributes to information overload

Workplace communication through social media

Social media are more conversational and reciprocally interactive between sender and receiver, resulting in a sense of community.
Each type of social media serves a unique combination of functions.
Enterprise social

Organizational Behavior
Chapter 11
Conflict and negotiation in the workplace

Meaning and consequences of conflict

Conflict: the process in which one party perceives that its interests are being opposed or negatively affected by another party.

Conflict is ultimately based on perceptions. It exists whenever one party believes that another might obstruct its efforts, regardless of whether the other party actually intends to do so.

Is conflict good or bad?

Conflict can have negative consequences under some circumstances:

• Reducing employee performance by consuming otherwise productive time
• Stressful
• Increases job dissatisfaction
• People who experience conflict tend to reduce their information sharing and other forms of coordination with each other.
• Conflict fuels organizational politics
• Conflict may undermine team cohesion and performance

Benefits of conflict

Optimal conflict perspective: organizations are most effective when employees experience some level of conflict, but becomes less effective with high levels of conflict.

• Conflict energizes people to debate issues and evaluative alternatives more thoroughly.
  They probe and test each other’s way of thinking to better understand the underlying issues that need to be addressed.
• Moderate levels of conflict prevent organizations from becoming nonresponsive to their external environment.
• When team members have a dispute or competition with external sources, this represents and external challenge that potentially increases cohesion within the team.

The emerging view: task and relationship conflict

There are various types of conflicts with different consequences.
The two dominant types are:

• Task conflict: a type of conflict in which people focus their discussion around the issue while showing respect for people who have other points of view. Constructive conflict.
  Process conflict → how the work should be done and who should perform the various task roles.
  Functional
• Relationship conflict: a type of conflict in which people focus on characteristics of other individuals, rather than on the issues, as the source of conflict.
  Dysfunctional

Separating task form relationship conflict

Separating task form relationship conflict is not easy.
Three conditions potentially minimize the level of relationship conflict during task conflict episodes:

• Emotional intelligence and emotional stability.
• Cohesive team
• Supportive team norms

Organizational Behavior 
Chapter 13
Designing organizational structures

Organizational structure: the division of labor as well as the patterns of coordination, communication, workflow, ad formal power that direct organizational activities.

Two fundamental processes in organizational structure:

• Division of labor
• Coordination

Four main elements of organizational structure:

• Span of control
• Centralization
• Formalization
• Departmentalization

Contingencies of organizational design:

• External environment
• Organizational size
• Technology
• Strategy

Division of labor and coordination

Division of labor

Division of labor: the subdivision of work into separate jobs assigned to different people.
Subdivided work leads to job specialization.
Job specialization increases work efficiency.

Coordination of work activities

When people divide work among themselves, they require coordinating mechanisms to ensure that everyone works in concert.
Coordination is so closely connected to division of labor that the optimal level of specialization is limited by the feasibility of coordinating the work. An organization’s ability to divide work among people depends on how well those people can coordinate each other.
Coordination tends to become more expensive and difficult as the division of labor increases.

Coordinating mechanisms:

• Informal communication
  All organizations rely on informal communication as a coordinating mechanism.
  Includes sharing information on mutual tasks as well as forming common mental models so that employees synchronize work activities using the same mental road map.

Vital in nonroutine and ambiguous situations.
Liaison roles, expected to communicate and share information with coworkers in other work units. Integrator roles, people are responsible for coordinating a work process by encouraging employees in each work unit to share information and informally coordinate work activities.

• Formal hierarchy
• Standardization

Organizational Behavior
Chapter 15
Organizational changes

Lewin’s force field analysis model

Organizations operate as open systems that need to keep pace with ongoing changes in their external environment.
Successful organizations monitor their environments and take appropriate steps to maintain a compatible fit with new external conditions.
Employees in successful companies embrace change as an integral part of organizational life.

Force field analysis: Kurt Lewin’s model of systemwide change that helps change agents diagnose the forces that drive and restrain proposed organizational change.

• One side of the force field model represents driving forces that push organizations toward a new state of affairs.
• The other side of Lewin’s model represents the restraining forces that maintain the status quo. Resistance to change.

Stability occurs when the driving and restraining forces are roughly in equilibrium, they are of approximately equal strength in opposite directions.

• Change occurs by unfreezing.
  Unfreezing: the first part of the change process, in which the change agent produces disequilibrium between the driving and restraining forces.
• Moving to a desired condition
• Refreezing: the latter part of the change process, in which systems and structures are introduced that reinforce and maintain the desired behaviors.

Understanding resistance to change

Resistance to change takes many forms, ranging from over work stoppages to subtle attempts to continue the old ways.
Subtle resistance is more common than overt resistance.

Resistance is a common and natural human response.

Resistance is a form of conflict, but change agents unfortunately sometimes interpret that disagreement as relationship conflict.
Perversely, the change agent’s conflict-oriented response to resistance tends to escalate the conflict, which often generates even stronger resistance to the change initiative.

A more productive approach is to view resistance to change as task conflict.
From the task conflict perspective, resistance is a signal either that the change agent has not sufficiently prepared employees for change or that the change initiative should be altered or improved.
Employees might not feel sufficiently strong urgency to change, or they might feel the change strategy is ill-conceived.
Or they lack confidence to change or believe that change will make them worse of than the current situation.

Resistance is also a form of voice, so discussion potentially improves procedural justice through voice, as well as decision making through involvement.
By redirecting