Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition) a summary
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Organizational Behavior
Chapter 1
Introduction to the filed of Organizational behavioral
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:
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:
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
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.
At a macro level, information technology has reconfigured entire organizations by integrating suppliers and other external entities into the transformation process.
Eventually, technology may render organizations less of a place where people work and more of a process or network where people collaborate across space and time.
Globalization
Economic, social and cultural connectivity with people in other parts of the world.
Organizations globalize when they actively participate in other countries and cultures.
The degree of globalization today is unprecedented because information technology and transportation systems allow a much more intense level of connectivity and interdependence around the planet.
Benefits:
There is debate about whether globalization benefits developing nations and the extent to which it is responsible for increasing work intersification, reduced job security, and poor work-life balance in developing countries.
OB focuses on the effects of globalization on organizations and how to lead and work effectively in this emerging reality.
Emerging employment relationships
Technology, globalization, and several other developments have substantially altered the employment relationship in most countries.
One of the most important employment issues over the past decade has been work-life balance.
Work-life balance occurs when people are able to minimize conflict between their work and nonwork demands.
Most employees lack this balance.
Another trend is for employees to work away from the organization’s traditional common work site.
Telecommuting
An arrangement whereby, supported by information technology, employees work from home one or more work days per month rather than commute to the office.
Advantage:
Disadvantage:
Success depends on several characteristics of the employee, the job, and organization.
Creating workforce diversity
Surface-level diversity: the observable demographic or physiological differences in people.
Deeper-level diversity: differences in the psychological characteristics of employees, including personalities, beliefs, values and attitudes.
Consequences of diversity
Advantages;
Teams with high informational diversity (members have different knowledge and skills):
Challenges
The systematic research anchor
A key feature of OB knowledge is that is should be based on systematic research, which typically involves forming research questions, systematically collecting data, and testing hypotheses against those data.
Evidence-based management: the practice of making decisions and taking actions based on research evidence.
Why don’t decision makers consistently apply evidence-based management?
Suggestions to create a more evidence-based organization:
The multidisciplinary anchor
The field should welcome theories and knowledge from other disciplines, not just form its own isolated research base.
The contingency anchor
The effect of one variable on another variable often depends on the characteristics of the situation of people involved.
A single solution or outcome rarely exists. A particular action may have different consequences under different conditions.
The multiple levels of analysis anchor
What goes on in organizations can be placed into three levels of analysis
Organizational effectiveness: a broad concept represented by several perspectives, including the organization's fit with the external environment, internal subsystems configuration for high performance, emphasis on organizational learning, and ability to satisfy the needs of key stakeholders.
The best yardstick of organizational effectiveness is a composite of four perspectives:
Open systems
A perspective that holds that organizations depend on the external environment for resources, affect that environment through output, and consists of internal subsystems that transform inputs to outputs.
As open systems, organizations depend on the external environment for resources.
The external environment also consists of rules and expectations that place demands on how organizations should operate.
Some environmental resources are transformed into output that are exported to the external environment, whereas other resources become subsystems in the transformation process.
Inside the organization are numerous subsystems.
These subsystems are dependent on each other as they transform inputs to outputs.
Some outputs may be valued by the environment, other outputs are undesirable by-products.
Throughout he process, organizations receive feedback form the external environment regarding the value of their outputs, the availability of future inputs, and the appropriateness of the transformation process.
Organization-environment fit
Organizations are effective when they maintain a good ‘fit’ with their external environment.
Good fits exists when the organization’s inputs, processes and outputs are aligned with the resources available in the external environment as well as with the needs and expectations of that environment.
Organizations maintain a good environmental fit in three ways:
Effective transformation process
An important feature of an effective transformation process is how well the internal subsystems coordinate with each other.
Organization learning perspective
A perspective that holds that organizational effectiveness depends on the organization’s capacity to acquire, share, use, and store valuable knowledge.
Intellectual capital: a company’s stock of knowledge, including:
An organization’s intellectual capital develops and is maintained through:
High-performance work practices perspective
High-performance work practices (HPWPs): a perspective that holds that effective organizations incorporate several workplace practices that leverage the potential of human capital.
Employee involvement and autonomy strengthen employee motivation, improve decision making, accelerate organizational responsiveness, and increase employee commitment to change.
High-performance work practices improves an organization’s effectiveness in three ways:
Stakeholder perspective
Stakeholders: individuals, groups, and other entities that affect, or are affected by, the organization’s objectives and actions.
Stakeholder relations are dynamically. They can be negotiated an influenced.
Organizations are more effective when they understand, manage, and satisfy stakeholder needs and expectations.
There are many types of stakeholders, and they are continuously evolving.
Understanding, managing, and satisfying the interests of stakeholders is challenging because they have conflicting interests and organizations lack sufficient resources to satisfy everyone. Organizational leaders need to decide how much priority to give to each group.
Values, ethics, and corporate social responsibility
Values: relatively stable, evaluative beliefs that guide a person’s preferences for outcomes or courses of action in a variety of situations.
The stakeholders perspective provides valuable details about features of the external environment that are missing form the open system perspective.
It incorporates values, ethics, and social responsibility into the organizational effectiveness equation.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR): organizational activities intended to benefit society and the environment beyond the firm’s immediate financial interest or legal obligations.
Companies have a contract with society, in which they must serve stakeholders beyond stockholders and customers.
Connecting the dots: an integrative model of organizational behavior
The four perspectives of organizational behavior:
Organizational effectiveness is the ultimate dependent variable in organizational behavior.
Individual inputs and processes influence individual outcomes, which in turn have a direct effect on the organization’s effectiveness.
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This is a summary of the book Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S (8th edition). This book is about psychology at the workplace. It contains for instance ways to increase employee satisfaction and workplace dynamics. The book is used in the course 'Labor and and
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