Perceiving ourselves and others in organizations - summary of chapter 3 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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 above average
  • Believe that they have a better average probability of success
  • Attribute successes to personal motivation or ability

But, people rate themselves above average only for things that are important to them and that are relatively common.

Self-enhancement,

  • Positive

    • Individuals tend to experience better mental and physical health when they amplify their self-concept.
    • Over-confidence generates a can-do attitude that motivates persistence in difficult or risky tasks
  • Negative
    • Self-enhancement causes people to overestimate future returns in investment decisions and engage in unsafe behavior.
    • Responsible for executives repeating poor decisions, launch misguided corporate diversification strategies, and acquire excessive corporate debt

Self-verification

A person’s inherent motivation to confirm and maintain his or her existing self-concept.
Employees actively communicate their self-concept so coworkers understand it and provide verifying feedback.

Self-verification includes seeking feedback that is not necessarily flattering.

Self-verification is associated with several OB topics

  • It affects the perceptual process because employees are more likely to remember information that is consistent with their self-concept. And they non-consciously screen out information that seems inconsistent with it.
  • People with high self-concept clarity will consciously dismiss feedback that contradicts their self-concept.
  • Employees are motivated to interact with others who affirm their self-views

Self-evaluation

Defined by three elements:

Self-esteem

The extend to which people like, respect and are satisfied with themselves.
Represents a global self-evaluation.

People have degrees of self-esteem for each of their various roles. From these multiple self-appraisals, people form an overall evaluation of themselves, → their global self-esteem.
People with high self-esteem are less influenced by others, tend to persist in spite of failure, and have a higher propensity to think logically.

Self-efficacy

A person’s belief about successfully completing a task.
Those with high self-efficacy have a ‘can-do’ attitude. Often task specific.

People have a general self-efficacy when they belief they can be successful across a variety of situations.
People whit higher general self-efficacy have a more positive overall self-evaluation.

Locus of control

A person’s general beliefs about the amount of control he or she has over personal life events.
Individuals with an internal locus of control belief that life events are caused mainly by their personal characteristics.

A generalized belief, but this belief varies to some extent with the situation.
People with an internal locus of control have a more positive self-evaluation. They also tend to perform better in most employment situations, are more successful in their careers, earn more money, and are better suited for leadership positions.

The social self

Social identity theory: a theory that people define themselves by the groups to which they belong or have an emotional attachment.

Social identity is a complex combination of many memberships arranged in a hierarchy of importance.
Determining importance:

  • How easily you are identified as a member of a reference group
  • Your minority status in a group
  • The group’s status

All of us try to balance our personal and social identities, but the priority of uniqueness (personal identities) versus belongingness (social identities) differs from one person to the next.

Expressing disagreement with others is a sign of distinctiveness and can help employees form a clear self-concept, particularly when that disagreement is based on differences in personal values.

Perceiving the world around us

Perception: the process of receiving information about and making sense of the world around us.
Determining which information to notice, as well as how to categorize and interpret it withing the framework of our existing knowledge.

Selective attention: the process of attending to some information received by our senses and ignoring other information.
Influenced by characteristics of the person or object being perceived. Also by context. Characteristics of the perceiver also influence selective attention, usually without the perceivers awareness.

When information is received through the senses, our brain quickly and non-consciously assesses whether it is relevant or irrelevant to us and then attaches emotional markers to the retained information.
Emotional markers help us store information in memory. Those emotions are later reproduced when recalling the perceived information.

Selective attention problems:

  • The effect of our assumptions and expectations about future events
  • Confirmation bias

Perceptual organization and interpretations

We pay attention to a tiny fraction of the stimuli received by the senses. Even so, the human brain further reduces the huge volume and complexity of the information received through various perceptual grouping strategies.

Perceptual grouping occurs mostly without our awareness, yet it is the foundation for making sense of things and fulfilling our need for cognitive closure.

  • Categorical thinking (organizing people and objects into preconceived categories that are stored in our long-term memory).
    Usually grouped based on observable similarity.
    Or based on proximity to each other.

Another form of perceptual grouping involves filling in missing information.
Or when we think we see trends in otherwise ambiguous information.

Along with perceptual grouping, making sense of the world around us involves interpreting information.
This happens as quickly as selecting and organizing because the previously mentioned emotional markers are tagged to incoming stimuli, which are essentially quick judgments about whether information is good or bad to us.

Mental models

Knowledge structures that we develop to describe, explain and predict the world around us.
They consist of visual or relational images in our mind.

Rely on the process of perceptual grouping to make sense of things. They fill in the missing pieces, including the causal connection among events.
Important for sense making, yet they also make it difficult to see the world in different ways.

The most important way to minimize the perceptual problems with mental models is to be aware of and frequently question them. We need to ask ourselves about the assumptions we make.
Working with people from diverse backgrounds is another way to break out of existing mental models.

Specific perceptual processes and problems

Stereotyping in organizations

Stereotyping: the process of assigning traits to people based on their membership in a social category.
Shared beliefs across an entire society and sometimes across several cultures.

Why people stereotype

  • As a form of categorical thinking, stereotyping is usually a non-conscious ‘energy-saving’ process that simplifies our understanding of the world.
  • We have an innate need to understand and anticipate how others will behave.
    The higher the perceiver’s need for cognitive closure, the higher the reliance on stereotypes.
  • Motivated by the observer’s need for social identity and self-enhancement

The combination of social-identity and self-enhancement leads to the processes of:

  • Categorization
  • Homogenization
    We tend to think that people within each group are very similar to each other.
  • Differentiation
    We tend to assign more favorable characteristics to people in our groups than to people in other groups.

Problems with stereotyping

Stereotyping distorts perceptions in various ways

  • Stereotypes do not accurately describe every person in a social category
  • Stereotype threat (an individual’s concern about confirming a negative stereotype about his or her group). Often results in displaying the stereotype trait they are trying to avoid.
  • It lays the foundation for discriminatory attitudes and behavior

Most of this perceptual bias occurs at unintentional (systemic) discrimination whereby decision makers rely on stereotypes to establish notions to he ‘ideal’ person in specific roles.
Implicit, automatic and unintentional

Intentional discrimination or prejudice.
People hold unfounded negatived attitudes toward people belonging to a particular stereotyped group.

Deliberate

Attribution theory

Attribution process: the perceptual process of deciding whether an observed behavior or event is caused largely by internal or external factors.

Three attribution rules

  • Consistency
    Object
  • Distinctiveness
    Context
  • Consensus

The attribution process is important because understanding cause-effect relationships enables us to work more effectively with others and to assign praise or blame to them.
We react differently to attributions of our own behavior and performance.

Attribution errors

We are strongly motivated to assign internal or external attributions to someone’s behavior, but hits perceptual process is also susceptible to errors.

  • Self-serving bias (the tendency to attribute our favorable outcomes to internal factors and our failures to external factors)
    Associated with the self-enhancement process
  • Fundamental attribution error. Or correspondence bias (the tendency to see the person rather than the situation as the main cause of that person’s behavior)

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Our perceptions can influence reality.

Contingencies of self-fulfilling prophecy

The self-fulfilling prophecy effect is stronger in some situations than in others.
It has a stronger effect at the beginning of a relationship.

It is stronger when several people hold the same expectations of the individual.
It is stronger among people with a history of low achievement, these people tend to have a low self-esteem, so they are easily influenced by others.

Positive organizational behavior: a perspective of organizational behavior that focuses on building positive qualities and traits within individuals or institutions as opposed to focusing on what is wrong with them.

Other perceptual effects

Four additional biases:

Halo effect

A perceptual error whereby our general impression of a person, usually based on one prominent characteristic, colors our perception of other characteristics of that person.
Most likely to occur when important information about the perceived target is missing or we are not sufficiently motivated to search for it.

False-consensus effect

A perceptual error in which we overestimate the extent to which others have beliefs and characteristics similar to our own.
Explanations

We are comforted believing that others are similar to us, particularly regarding less acceptable or diverse behavior
We interact more with people who have similar views and behaviors
We are more likely to remember information that is consistent with our own views and selectively screen out information that is contrary to our beliefs
Our social identity process homogenizes people withing groups

Primacy effect

A perceptual error in which we quickly form an opinion of people based on the first information we receive about them.
First impressions are lasting impressions

Recency effect

A perceptual error which the recent information dominates our perception of others.
Most common when people make a decision involving complex information.

Improving perceptions

Three potentially effective ways.

Awareness of perceptual biases

Can reduce the biases to some extent by making people more mindful of their thoughts and actions.
But it has only limited effect.

  • Teaching people to reject incorrect stereotypes has the unintended effect of reinforcing rather than reducing reliance on those stereotypes.
  • Diversity training is ineffective for people with deeply held prejudices against those groups

Improving self-awareness

Tends to reduce perceptual biases by making people more open-minded and nonjudgmental toward others.

Meaningful interaction

Any activity in which people engage in valued activities.

Contact hypotheses: a theory that the more we interact with someone, the less prejudiced or perceptually biased we will be against that person.

Meaningful interaction is the strongest when people work closely and frequently with each other on a shared goal that requires mutual cooperation and reliance. Everyone should have equal status in that context, should be engaged in a meaningful task, and should have positive experiences with each other in those interactions.

Meaningful interaction reduces dependence on stereotypes because we gain better knowledge about individuals and experience their unique attributes in action.
It potentially improves empathy toward others.

Empathizing reduces attribution errors by improving our sensitivity to the external causes of another person’s performance and behavior.

BUT
Trying to emphasize with others without spending time with them might actually increase rather than reduce stereotyping and other perceptual biases.

Global mindset: developing perceptions across borders

Global mindset: an individuals ability to perceive, appreciate, and emphasize with people from other cultures, and to process complex cross-cultural information.
Includes:

  • An awareness of, openness to, and respect for others views and practices in the world
  • The capacity to emphasize and act efficiently across cultures
  • The ability to process complex information about novel environments
  • The ability to comprehend and reconcile inter-cultural matters with multiple levels of thinking

Developing a global mindset

Involves improving one’s perceptions.
It begins with self-awareness

Develops through better knowledge of people and cultures

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Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition) a summary

Introduction to the filed of Organizational behavioral - summary of chapter 1 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Introduction to the filed of Organizational behavioral - summary of chapter 1 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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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

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Individual behavior, personality and values - summary of chapter 2 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Individual behavior, personality and values - summary of chapter 2 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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Organizational Behavior
Chapter 2
Individual behavior, personality and values


MARS model of individual behavior and performance

For most of the past century, experts have investigated the direct predictions of individual behavior and performance.

  • One of the earliest formulas was: performance = person X situation

Person: individual characteristics
Situation: external influences on the individuals behavior

Another formula
Performance = ability X motivation
The skill-and-will model

AMO model
Ability-motivation-opportunity

Limited interpretation of the situation

MARS
Four variables

  • Motivation
  • Ability
  • Role perception
  • Situational factors

All factors critical influences on an individual’s voluntary behavior and performance
These are direct predictors of behavior on the workplace.

Employee motivation

Motivation: the forces within a person that affect his or her direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary behavior.
Direction refers to the path along which people steer their effort. Motivation is goal-directed.

Intensity is the amount of effort allocated with the goal.
Persistence refers to the length of time that the individual continues to exert effort toward an objective. Employees sustain their effort until they reach their goal or give up beforehand.

Ability

The natural aptitudes and learned capabilities required to successfully complete a task.
Aptitudes are the natural talents.

Learned capabilities are the physical and mental skills and knowledge you have acquired. They tend to wane over time when not used.
Aptitudes and learned capabilities are the main elements of competencies.

Role perceptions

The degree to which a person understands the job duties assigned to or expected of him or her.

Role clarity exists in three forms:

  • When employees understand the specific duties or consequences for which they are accountable.
  • When employees understand the priority of their various tasks and performance expectations.
  • Understanding the preferred behaviors or procedures for accomplishing tasks.

Situational factors

Individual behavior and performance depend on the situation.
Two main influences:

  • The work context constrains of facilitates behavior and performance
  • Situations provide cues that guide and motivate people

Types of individual behavior

Task performance

The individual’s voluntary goal-directed behaviors that contribute to organizational objectives.
Three types:

  • Proficient task performance
    Prforming the work efficiently and accurately
  • Adaptive
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Perceiving ourselves and others in organizations - summary of chapter 3 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Perceiving ourselves and others in organizations - summary of chapter 3 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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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
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Workplace emotions, attitudes, and stress - summary of chapter 4 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Workplace emotions, attitudes, and stress - summary of chapter 4 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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Organizational Behavior
Chapter 4

Workplace emotions, attitudes, and stress


Emotions in the workplace

Emotions influence almost everything we do in the workplace.
Often occur before cognitive processes and, consequently influence them.

Emotions: physiological, behavioral, and psychological episodes experienced toward an object, person, or event that create a state of readiness.
Quite short.

Directed toward someone or something.
Emotions are experiences, they represent changes in our physiological state, psychological state and behavior.
Most of these emotional reactions are subtle, they occur without our awareness.

Moods are not directed towards anything in particular and tend to be long-term emotional states.

Types of emotions

All emotions have two common features.

  • An associated valance (core affect) signaling that the perceived object or event should be approached or avoided.
  • The level of activation

Emotions, attitudes, and behavior

Attitudes are judgments, whereas emotions are experiences.
We experience emotions very briefly, whereas our attitude towards something or someone is more stable over time.

Beliefs

These are your established perceptions about the attitude object, what you believe to be true.
Each of these beliefs also has a valence, you have a positive or negative feeling about each belief.

Feelings

Represent your conscious positive or negative evaluations of the attitude object.
Most of the time, your beliefs about something or someone affect your feelings, but the reverse sometimes occurs. Your feelings about something can cause you to change your feelings about specific beliefs regarding that target.

Behavioral intentions

Your motivation to engage in a particular behavior regarding the attitude object.

Attitude-behavior contingencies

  • People with the same beliefs might form quite different feelings toward the attitude object because they have different valences for those beliefs.
  • People with the same feelings toward the attitude object often develop different behavioral intentions because of their unique experiences, personal values, self-concept, and other individual differences.

How emotions influence attitudes and behavior

Our brain tags incoming sensory information with emotional markers based on a quick and imprecise evaluation of whether that information supports or threatens our innate drives.
They are automatic and non-conscious.

The experienced emotions influence our feelings about the attitude object.

Generating positive emotions at work

Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance: an emotional experience caused by a perception that our beliefs, feelings, and behavior are incongruent with one

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Foundations of employee motivation- summary of chapter 5 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Foundations of employee motivation- summary of chapter 5 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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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:

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Applied Performance Practices- summary of chapter 6 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Applied Performance Practices- summary of chapter 6 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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Organizational Behavior
Chapter 6
Applied Performance Practices


The meaning of money in the workplace

Money is much more than an object of compensation for an employee’s contribution to organizational objectives.
Money relates to our needs and our self-concept.

It generates a variety of emotions.
Money is a symbol of achievement and status, a motivator, and an influence on our propensity to make ethical or risky decisions.

To some extent, the influence of money on human thoughts and behavior occurs nonconsiously.

The meaning of money varies considerably form one person to the next.
The meaning and effects of money differ between men and women.

  • Men attach more importance or value to money
  • Men are more likely to view money as a symbol of power and status as well as the means to autonomy.
  • Women are more likely to view money in terms of things for which it can be exchanged

The meaning of money varies across cultures.

  • People in countries with high power distance tend to have a high respect and priority for money
  • People in countries with a strong egalitarian culture are discouraged from openly talking about money or displaying their personal wealth

The motivational effect of money is due more to its symbolic value than to what it can buy.

Financial reward practices

Membership- and seniority-based rewards

Sometimes called pay for pulse.

Sample rewards

Advantages

Disadvantages

Fixed pay

May attract applicants

Doesn’t directly motivate performance

Most employee benefits

Minimized stress of insecurity

May discourage poor performers from leaving

Paid time off

Reduces turnover

‘golden handcuffs’ may undermine performance

 

Job status-based rewards

Companies measure job worth through job evaluation.
Job evaluation: systematically rating the worth of jobs within an organization by measuring the required skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions.

 

Sample rewards

Advantages

Disadvantages

Promotion-based

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Decision making and creativity- summary of chapter 7 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Decision making and creativity- summary of chapter 7 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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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.

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Team dynamics - summary of chapter 8 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Team dynamics - summary of chapter 8 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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Organizational Behavior
Chapter 8
Team dynamics


Teams and informal groups

Teams: groups of two or more people who interact with and influence each other, are mutually accountable for achieving common goals associated with organizational objectives, and perceive themselves as a social entity within an organization.

All teams exist to fulfill some purpose.
Team members are held together by their interdependence and need for collaboration to achieve common goals.

Team members influence each other.
A team exist when it members perceive themselves as a team.

Each type of team in an organization can be distinguished by three characteristics:

  • Team permanence
    How long that type of team usually exists
  • Skill diversity
    Members possess different skills and knowledge
  • Authority dispersion
    The degree that decision-making responsibility is distributed throughout the team

Informal groups

Why do informal groups exist?

  • Human beings are social animals
  • Social identity theory
  • They accomplish personal objectives that cannot be achieved by individuals working alone.
  • We are comforted by the mere presence of other people

Informal groups and organizational outcomes

Informal groups potentially minimize employee stress. This improves employee well-being.
Informal groups are the backbone of social networks.

Advantages and disadvantages of teams

In many situations, people are potentially more motivated when working in teams than when working alone.

  • Employees have a drive to bond and are motivated to fulfill the goals of groups to which they belong
  • Accountability to fellow team members
  • Coworkers become benchmarks of comparison

The challenges of teams

Process losses: resources (including time and energy) expended toward team development and maintenance rather than the task.
Amplified when more people are added or replace others on the team.

Brooks’s law: the principle that adding more people to a late software project only makes it later.

Social loafing

Social loafing: the problem that occurs when people exert less effort (and usually perform at a lower level) when working in teams than when working alone.
A motivational process loss.

More pervasive when:

  • Individual performance is hidden or difficult to distinguish from the performance of other team members
  • When the work is boring or the team’s overall task has low significance
  • Individual characteristics
  • Lack motivation to
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Communicating in teams and organizations - summary of chapter 9 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Communicating in teams and organizations - summary of chapter 9 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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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

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Power and influence in the workplace - summary of chapter 10 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Power and influence in the workplace - summary of chapter 10 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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Organizational Behavior
Chapter 10
Power and influence in the workplace


The meaning of power

Power: the capacity of a person, team or organization to influence others.

  • It is only the potential
  • Power is based on the target’s perception that the power controller holds
  • Power involves asymmetric (unequal) dependence of one party on another party
    Countervailing power: the capacity of a person, team or organization to keep a more powerful person or group in the exchange relationship.
  • All power relationships depend on some minimum level of trust

Managers typically have more power, whereas employees have weaker countervailing power.
Sometimes employees have more power than their bosses.

Power is derived from four sources:

  • Legitimate
  • Reward
  • Coercive expert
  • Referent

Four contingencies of power:

  • The employees or department’s substitutability
  • Centrality
  • Discretion
  • Visibility

Sources of power in organizations

Tree sources of power originate mostly form the power holder’s formal position or informal role

  • Legitimate
  • Reward
  • Coercive

Two other sources of power originate mainly from the power holder’s own characteristics

  • Expert
  • Referent

Legitimate power

Legitimate power: an agreement among organizational members that people in certain roles can request certain behaviors of others.
This perceived right or obligation originates from formal job descriptions as well as informal rules of conduct.

Legitimate power has restrictions.
It gives the power holds only the right to ask others to perform a limited domain of behaviors. This domain is the zone of indifference.

The size of the zone of indifference increases with the level of trust in the power holder.
Some values and personality traits also make people more obedient to authority.
The organization’s culture represents another influence on the willingness of employees to follow orders.

Norm of reciprocity: a felt obligation and social expectation of helping or otherwise giving something of value to someone who has already helped or given something of value to you.
It is a form of legitimate power.

Legitimate power through information control

A particularly potent form of legitimate power occurs where people have the right to control information that others receive.

  • Information is a resource
  • Selectively distributing information in a way that affects how those receiving the information perceive
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Conflict and negotiation in the workplace - summary of chapter 11 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Conflict and negotiation in the workplace - summary of chapter 11 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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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

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Leadership in organizational settings- summary of chapter 12 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Leadership in organizational settings- summary of chapter 12 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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Organizational Behavior
Chapter 12
Leadership in organizational settings


What is leadership?

Leadership: influencing, motivating, and enabling others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members.

  • Leaders motivate others through persuasion and other influence tactics
  • Leaders are enablers

Shared leadership

Shared leadership: the view that leadership is a role, not a position assigned to one person. Consequently, people within the team and organization lead each other.

Shared leadership typically supplements formal leadership. Employees lead along with the formal manager, rather than replace the manager.
Shared leadership flourishes in organizations where the formal leaders are willing to delegate power and encourage employees to take initiative and risks without fear of failure. (a learning orientation culture).

Also collaborative rather than competitive.

Transformational leadership perspective

The most popular leadership perspective is transformational leadership.
Transformational leadership: a leadership that explains how leaders change teams or organizations by creating, communicating, and modeling a vision for the organization or work unit and inspiring employees to strive for that vision.

Four elements:

  • Develop and communicate a strategic vision
  • Model the vision
  • Encourage experimentation
  • Build commitment to the vision

Develop and communicate a strategic vision

The heart of transformational leadership is a strategic vision.
Vision: a positive image or model of the future that energizes and unifies employees.

Sometimes this vision is created by the leader, at other times it is formed by employees or other stakeholders and then adopted and championed by the formal leader.

An effective strategic vision has several identifiable features:

  • It refers to an idealized future with a higher purpose
    This purpose is associated with personal values that directly or indirectly fulfill the needs of multiple stakeholders.
  • A vision is a challenging, distant, and abstract goal. So it needs to motivate employees to accomplish it.
  • It is unifying

A strategic vision is necessarily abstract for two reasons:

  • The vision hasn’t yet been experienced, so it isn’t possible to detail what the vision looks like
  • An abstract description enable s the vision to remain stable over time, yet is sufficiently flexible to accommodate operational adjustments in a shifting external environment.

A strategic vision’s effectiveness depends on how leaders convey it to followers and other stakeholders.

  • Effective transformational
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Designing organizational structures - summary of chapter 13 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Designing organizational structures - summary of chapter 13 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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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

 

 

Form of coordination

Description

Subtypes/ strategies

Informal communication

Sharing information on mutual tasks.

Forming common mental models to synchronize work activities

Direct communication

Liaison roles

Integrator roles

Temporary teams

Formal hierarchy

Assigning legitimate power to individuals, who then use this power to direct work processes and allocate resources

Direct supervision

Formal communication channels

Standardization

Creating routine patterns of behavior or output

Standardized skills

Standardized processes

Standardized output

 

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Organizational culture- summary of chapter 14 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Organizational culture- summary of chapter 14 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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Organizational Behavior
Chapter 14
Organizational culture

Organizational culture: the values and assumptions shared within an organization.


Elements of organizational culture

Shared values and assumptions relate to each other and are associated with artifacts.

Values: stable, evaluative beliefs that guide our preferences for outcomes or courses of action in a variety of situations. Conscious perceptions about what is good or bad, right or wrong.
Shared values: values that people within the organization or wok unit have in common and place neat the top of their hierarchy of values.

Shared assumptions: nonconscious, taken-for-granted perceptions or ideal prototypes of behavior that are considered the correct way to think and act toward problems and opportunities.

Espoused versus enacted values

Espoused values: the values that corporate leaders hope will eventually become the organization’s culture, or at least the values they want others to believe guide the organization’s decisions and actions.
Usually socially desirable.

Enacted values: when they actually guide and influence decisions and behavior. Values put into practice.

Content of organizational culture

Organizations differ in the relative ordering of shared values. (cultural content).

Problems

  • People oversimplify the diversity of cultural values in organizations
  • Most measures ignore the shared assumptions aspect of an organizational culture
  • Many measures of organizational culture incorrectly assume that organizations have a fairly clear, unified culture that is easily decipherable.

In reality, an organizational culture is typically blurry and fragmented.

Organizational subcultures

When discussing organizational culture, we are really referring to the dominant culture.
Dominant culture: the values and assumptions shared most consistently and widely by the organization’s members.

Organizations are composed of subcultures, located throughout their various divisions, geographic regions, and occupational groups.
Some subcultures enhance the dominant culture by espousing parallel assumptions and values.

Others differ from, but do not conflict the dominant culture.
Countercultures embrace values or assumptions that directly oppose the organization’s dominant culture.
It is also possible that some organizations consist of subcultures with no decipherable dominant culture at all.

Subcultures, particularly countercultures, potentially create conflict and dissension among employees.
But they also serve two important functions:

  • They maintain the organization’s standards of performance and ethical behavior
  • Subcultures act as spawning groups for emerging values that keep the firm aligned with the evolving need and expectations of stakeholders.

Deciphering organizational culture through

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Organizational changes - summary of chapter 15 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Organizational changes - summary of chapter 15 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

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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

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