Summary of Essentials of Organizational Behavior - Robbins & Judge - 12th edition

Chapter 1. Introduction to Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior (OB): The study field of how individuals, people, groups and structure behave and act in organizations.

The study field is individuals, groups of people and the structure of the people and groups within the organization. The purpose of OB is to obtain information and knowledge about the behavior of an organization so they can work more efficient and effective.

OB’s core themes:

• Motivation

• Leader behavior and power

• Interpersonal communication

• Group structure and process

• Personality, emotions and values

• Attitude development and perception

• Change processes

• Conflict and negotiation

• Work design

Systematic study: Study that looks at relationships, and let’s scientific evidence helps us find causes, effects and conclusions.

Evidence based management (EBM): Management that uses scientific evidence to make decisions.

Organizational behavior is built on contributions from a number of behavioral disciplines:

• Psychology: A study of the behavior of humans. With contributions to learning, motivation, personality, job satisfaction and work design. (Micro-level)

• Social psychology: How people focus on each other and influence each other in a social way. With contributions to behavioral change, attitude change, communication, power and intergroup behavior. (Micro-level)

• Sociology: The study of how people react and what their relations are with culture, environment and organizations.

With contributions to communication, intergroup behavior, organizational technology, change and culture (Macro-level)

• Anthropology: The study of people and their activities in groups, cultures and different countries. With contributions to comparative values, attitudes, organizational culture and power. (Macro-level)

Contingency variables: Variables that lead to each other, but with special conditions. ‘One’ leads to ‘two’ under the condition that ‘three’.

There are some opportunities for Organizational Behavior, which make it important to look at OB. These challenges include:

• Responding to the Economic Pressures

• Responding to Globalization: where there is an increased amount of foreign assignments, more different cultures and countries with low-cost labor. Globalization: Focuses on the differences of people in different countries.

• Managing workforce diversity. Workforce diversity: Differences and similarities of people within an organization. This could be in terms of cultural background, sex, race, religion, etc. These differences should be taking into account to adapt to people in organizations.

• Improving customer service and people skills. Service job: The job in which an organization’s employee comes in direct contact with the customer.

• Coping with temporariness. Organizations are in a State of flux: The fluctuation of the organization’s divisions, businesses and operations. Organizations can reorganize or sell their divisions and businesses to stay healthy. The replacement of workers with temporary employees is part of this fluctuation.

• Working in networked organizations: An organization that is connected with other organizations and can work together, even though there is a time zone in between them.

Three levels of analysis: Individual, group and organization.

Where group ≠ Σ individuals

And organization ≠ Σ groups

Chapter 2. Diversity in Organizations

Effective diversity management increases an organization’s access to the widest possible pool of skills, abilities and ideas. Managers needs to recognize that differences among people can lead to misunderstandings, miscommunications and conflicts.

Levels of diversity

• Surface level diversity: are those differences that are easily noticeable and can lead employees to perceive one another through stereotypes and assumptions. Demographic characteristics.

• Deep-level diversity: they become less concerned about demographic differences if they see themselves as sharing more important characteristics such as personality and values.

Discrimination: allowing our behavior to be influenced by stereotypes about groups of people. There are different types of discrimination, such as sexual harassment, exclusion, incivility, mockery and insults, intimidation and discriminatory policies or practices.

Biographical characteristics are some of the most obvious ways employees differ. For example age, gender, race, disability and length of service.

We define race as the biological heritage people use to identify themselves.
Ethnicity is the additional set of culture characteristics that often overlaps with race.
A person is classified as disabled if this person has any physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. For example down syndrome.

Other biographical characteristics

• Tenure: expressed as work experience, appears to be a good predictor of employee productivity. Tenure and job satisfaction are positively related.

• Religion: faith can be an employment issue when religious beliefs prohibit or encourage certain behaviors. Often people of different religious faiths conflict.

• Sexual orientation and gender identity: employers differ widely in their treatment of sexual orientation. Companies are increasingly putting in place policies to govern how their organization treats people who change gender (transgender employees).

• Ability: an individual’s current capacity to perform the various tasks in a job. They are made up in a set of two factors: intellectual and physical.

  • Intellectual abilities: are abilities needed to perform mental activities, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving. Intelligence dimensions are positively related. General mental ability (GMA) is a general factor of intelligence.

  • Physical abilities: have been and will remain value. There are nine basic abilities needed in their performance of physical tasks.

Intellectual abilities

• Number aptitude: ability to do speedy and accurate arithmetic.

• Verbal comprehension: ability to understand what is read or heard and the relationship of words to each other.

• Perceptual speed: ability to identify visual similarities and differences quickly and accurate.

• Inductive reasoning: ability to identify a logical sequence in a problem and then solve the problem.

• Deductive reasoning: ability to use logic and assesses the implications of an argument.

• Spatial visualization: ability to imagine how an object would look if its position in space were changed.

• Memory: ability to retain and recall past experience

Physical abilities

• Strength factors

  • Dynamic strength: ability to exert muscular force repeatedly or continuously over time.

  • Trunk strength: ability to exert muscular strength using the trunk muscles.

  • Static strength: ability to exert force against external objects

  • Explosive strength: ability to expend a maximum of energy in one or a series of explosive acts.

• Flexibility factors

  • Extent flexibility: ability to move the trunk and back muscles as far as possible.

  • Dynamic flexibility: ability to make rapid, repeated flexing movements.
     

• Other factors

  • Body coordination: ability to coordinate the simultaneous actions of different parts of the body.

  • Balance: ability to maintain equilibrium despite forces pulling of balance.

  • Stamina: ability to continue maximum effort requiring prolonged effort over time.

Diversity management makes everyone more aware of and sensitive to the needs and differences of others. It must be an ongoing commitment that cross all levels of the organization. Group management, recruiting, hiring, retention, and development practices can all be designed to leverage diversity for the organization’s competitive advantage.

One method of enhancing workforce diversity is to target recruiting messages to specific demographic groups underrepresented in the workforce.
The selection process is one of the most important places to apply diversity efforts. Organizations that do not discourage discriminatory behavior are more likely to see problems.
Most contemporary workplaces require extensive work in group settings. When people work in groups, they need to establish a common way of looking at and accomplishing the major tasks. They also need to communicate with one other often.

Policies to improve the climate for diversity can be effective, so long as they are designed to acknowledge all employee’s perspectives. One-short diversity training session are less likely to be effective than comprehensive programs that address the climate for diversity at multiple levels.

Chapter 3. Job attitudes and satisfaction

Attitudes are evaluative statements about objects, people or events. They reflect how we feel about something. Attitudes are complex. Either favourable or unfavourable.

Attitudes have three components

• Cognition: a description of or believe in the way things are. Evaluation.

• Affect: is the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude.

• Behavior: describes an intention to behave in a certain way toward something or someone. It’s an action.

Viewing attitudes as having three components is helpful in understanding their complexity and the potential relationship between attitudes and behavior. There components are closely related, and cognition and affect are inseparable in many ways. Attitudes are important for their behavioural component in organizations.

Festinger proposed that cases of attitude following behavior illustrate the effects of cognitive dissonance, any incompatibility an individual might perceive between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes.

The most powerful moderators of attitudes relationships are the importance of the attitude, its correspondence to behavior, its accessibility, the presence of social pressures, and whether a person has direct experience with the attitude.

When people speak about employee’s attitudes, they usually mean job satisfaction. It describes a positive feeling about a job, resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. Job involvement is related to job satisfaction. Job involvement measures the degree to which people identify psychologically with their jobs and consider their perceived performance levels important to self-worth.
Psychological empowerment is the employee’s beliefs in the degree to which they influence their work environments, their competencies, the meaningfulness of their jobs and their perceived autonomy.

In organizational commitment, an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and wishes to remain a member. A positive relationship appears to exist between organizational commitment and job productivity.

Perceived organizational support (POS) is the degree to which employees believe the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being. Employee’s with strong POS perceptions have been found more likely to have higher levels of organizational citizenship behavior, lower level of tardiness and better customer services.

Employee engagement is a new concept. It means the individual’s involvement with, the satisfaction with, and the enthusiasm for the work she/he does.

Research has shown that people who have positive core self-evaluations (CSE), who believe in their inner worth and basic competence, are more satisfied with their jobs than those with negative CSE.

The exit-voice-loyalty-neglect framework is helpful to understand the consequences of dissatisfaction.

• Exit: the exit response directs behavior toward leaving the organization.

• Voice: the voice response includes actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions.

• Loyalty: the loyalty response means passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to improve.

• Neglect: the neglect response passively allows conditions to worsen.

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is the discretionary behavior that is not part of an employee’s formal job requirements, and that contributes to the psychological and social environment of the workplace. Job satisfaction is correlated with OCB.

Job appeal: the most important thing managers can do to raise employee satisfaction is focus on the intrinsic parts of the job, such as making the work challenging and interesting.

More than money. Although paying employees poorly will likely not attract high-quality employees to the organization to keep up high performance. Managers should realize that high pay alone is unlikely to create satisfaction work environment.

Chapter 4. Moods, Emotions, and Organizational behavior

Affect: A pattern of behavior that is observable and expressed by feelings people obtain. Can be positive or negative; A mood that consist of positive/negative emotions.

Emotions: An inner perception or intense feelings that is directed at someone or something in a spontaneous way or in a given situation.

Moods: A state of emotion. Has a positive or negative effect and can last much longer than an emotion.

The difference between an emotion and a mood is that emotions are often caused by a specific event, brief in duration and action oriented in nature, whereas moods are often general and unclear, last longer than emotions and are cognitive in nature.

The six basic Emotions are Anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust and surprise (6 most used). A positive emotion expresses an inner perception or feeling that is favorable in a given situation. A negative emotion is a no favorable feeling. The collection of positive emotions (=mood), can be described as a positive affect, where a negative affect is a mood dimensions.

Positivity offset: When you don’t get any emotional input of someone, then most individuals see this as a mildly positive mood.

Factors that have effect on emotions and moods:

• Personality: The way a certain person reacts to an emotion can be different from the reaction of others due to personality. There is a different in affect intensity: how strongly emotions influence a person.

• Day of the week and the time of the day: positive moods are highest at the end of the week, negative moods on Sundays and Mondays.

• Weather: Illusory correlation (when someone links two random events to each other that in reality do not have any connection). Weather has little influence.

• Stress

• Social activities: increase positive moods, especially physical, informal or epicurean activities

• Sleep: bad sleep impairs decision making and makes it difficult to control emotions.

• Exercise

• Age: for older persons, positive emotions stay longer and negative moods fade more quickly.

• Gender: women experience emotions more intensely and tend to hold onto emotions longer than men.

Emotional labor: How an employee expresses the emotions that the organization desires during work transactions in which he or she needs to be interpersonal.

Emotional dissonance: The dissonance that an employee has when he needs to fake an emotion for the sake of the organization. This dissonance is caused by the difference between Felt versus displayed emotions:

• Felt: The emotions that someone is actually experiencing

• Displayed: The emotions that an organization wants to see. This emotion is learned and the organization considers this emotion necessary in a given job.

There are two types of behavior caused by differences in felt and displayed emotions:

• Surface acting: The hiding of a person’s inner feelings and the waiving of emotional expressions in an organization in a response to the displayed rules.

  • Displayed emotions

• Deep acting: The result of surface acting in which the inner feeling changes to the feeling that the organization desires. The organizationally owned interest and identity of the worker immerses into his own goals and values.

  • Felt emotions

Emotional intelligence (EI): A person’s competence to (1) be assertive, (2) see the emotions that other persons have, and (3) control these emotions, cues and information. The strengths of EI are that it can predict criteria towards job performance and it is biologically based. The weaknesses that EI has are that it is vague and it is not easy to measure. This makes it unreliable.

The understandings of moods and emotions have a positive effect on:

• The selection process > EI should be considered as a factor in the hiring process. Hires who had high EI scores, where 2.6 times more successful than those who didn’t.

• Decision-making > Low level of EI ensures slow information processing and weighing all options, while high level of EI uses heuristics and use of thumb.

• Creativity: people in good moods tend to be more creative, more flexible and open in their thinking. Some researches state that all the activating moods seem to lead to more creativity, where deactivating moods lead to less.

• Motivation Feedback influences mood and mood influences motivation. Positive mood enables higher believe to solve a problem and a higher motivation.

• Leadership >Increases effectiveness

• Interpersonal conflict

• Negotiation and customer service: Using anger in negotiation gives advantages, but feeling bad about your performance appears to impair future negotiations. Emotional contagion: the matching effect between employee and customer emotions and this is important in customer services.

• Job attitude and deviant workplace behavior

Managers need to be aware of the emotional norms in each culture they do business in, so they don’t send unintended signals or misread the reactions of locals.

Chapter 5. Personality Traits and Work Values

Personality: The way that the combination of emotions, attitudes and behavior lets an individual respond to and interact with other individuals. Personality can be measured by self-report surveys, in which individuals evaluate themselves on a series of factors. Problem with self-report for hiring is that people rate themselves to high and the accuracy, because the answers are dependent on the mood of the candidate.

Heredity: The transmission of properties from parent or ancestors to descendants. The personality of an individual is captured in the modular structure of the genes, which are located in the DNA of an individual. But personality can change over time, but everyone tends to change by the same amount, and therefore the rank order stays roughly the same.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): Is a personality test which consists of 100 questions that show how people feel or (re)act in a certain situation based on four dimensions:

• Extravert (E) outgoing, sociable vs Introvert (I) quiet and shy

• Sensing (S) practical and prefer routine vs Intuitive (N) unconscious processes and look at the big picture

• Thinking (T) use reason and logic to handle vs Feeling (F) rely on personal values and emotions

• Judging (J) want to control and a structured world vs Perceiving (P) are flexible and spontaneous

Big Five personality traits: Using the Big Five to describe a person’s personality

Five Factor Model:

• Extraversion: The degree to which someone is comfortable in relationships.

Introvert vs extravert. Affect higher performance and job satisfaction and enhanced leadership.

• Agreeableness: The degree to which someone shows agreeableness, warmth and sympathy. Higher performance, lower levels of deviant behavior.

• Conscientiousness: The degree to which someone is reliable. Higher performance, enhanced leadership, greater longevity.

• Emotional stability: The stability of someone’s emotions is a measure of withstanding stress. Higher job and life satisfaction and lower stress.

• Openness to experience: The degree to which someone is open to experience new things and new interests. Training performance, Creative, enhanced leadership and more adaptable to change.

Besides the five personality traits which are described in the Big Five model, there are some other traits which are relevant to OB;

Core self-evaluation: The way you think about yourself, which can be positive or negative. Has a relation to job satisfaction.

Machiavellianism: The tension to mislead someone in order to create a power advantage. Machiavellianism does whatever it takes to get a higher power status.

High Machs:

Rather interact face to face with others instead of indirectly

Are good in improvising and thus desire a situation which has a minimal number of rules and regulations

Tend to distract low Machs by telling emotional details that are irrelevant to win

Narcissism: A person with self-confidence so high that he is able to fall in love with himself. Key words are arrogance, self-importance, etc.

Self-monitoring: The ability of an individual to control his expressions and behavior in situations with external factors.

Risk-taking: The risk that people take in jobs and on the work floor. Influenced by the work self and the work environment.

Type A personality: Persons who always, chronic, want to achieve more in less time and are willing to take actions against the adverting effects of others. They want to do much more things than they can in very little time.

Type B personality: Persons who are not hurried by time and want to do an increasing number of thing or increasing set of events in time that is decreasing. They want to do too many things in too little time.

Proactive personality: A person, who has an active attitude towards opportunities, shows initiative and stick to meaningful changes until they happen.

Besides personal traits values influence the way we think about things. Values: The assessment someone gives to a person, situation or object. Contains things like ‘right and wrong’.

Content attribute: What is the importance of the value?

Intensity attribute: The intensity of a value which attributes to the value system of someone

Rokeach survey: A value classification system that contains terminal and instrumental values, each containing 18 individual value items.

Terminal values: The end-state that a person would like to have achieved before he dies. Examples of terminal values are economic success, freedom, health, world peace, social recognition and meanding in life.

Instrumental values: The mode of behavior that is preferable for the terminal values to be achieved. Examples of instrumental values are self-improvement, autonomy, discipline, kindness, ambition and goal orientation.

Person-jobfit theory: Six personality types that indicates how a person fits his or her job.

1. Realistic: skill strength and coordination. Often shy, stable and practical and desirable in mechanic and assembly-line functions.

2. Investigative: prefers activities that involve thinking, organizing and understanding. Desirable in functions such as biologist, economist.

3. Social: prefers activities that involve helping and developing. Desirable in functios as social worker, teacher and counselor.

4. Conventional: prefers rule-regulated, orderly and unambiguous activities. Jobs who fit to these people are accountant or bank teller.

5. Enterprising: prefers verbal activities in which there are opportunities to influence others and attain power. Desirable in functions as lawyer and small business manager.

6. Artistic: prefers ambiguous and unsystematic activities that allow creative expression. Desirable for painters, musicians or writers.

Key points to person-fit model:

People have intrinsic differences

Not all the jobs are the same

People who have jobs that fit their personality are likely to be more satisfied and are less likely to resign then people who have jobs that are incongruent with their personality

Person-organization fit theory: People choose organizations based on values and are much more attracted to organizations that match their values. If an organization is does not fit those values, people are likely to leave them.

Hofstede’s Framework for assessing cultures:

Power distance: Do people in a country accept that not all the power in an organization is distributed equally?

Individualism vs collectivism

Masculinity vs feminity: Does women have the same roles as men?

Uncertain avoidance: Do people in a country prefer structured or unstructured situations? The use of laws and controls can reduce uncertain avoidance.

Longterm vs shortterm orientation

Chapter 6. Individual perception and decision making

Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment. People’s behavior is based on their perception on what reality is, not on reality itself.

There are three factors that influence perception

• Perceiver. When you look at a target and attempt to interpret what you see. Your interpretation is extremely influenced by your personal characteristics.

• Target. Characteristics of the target also affect what we perceive. Loud people are more likely to be noticed in a group than quiet people.

• Situation. Context matters too. The time at which we see an object or event can influence our attention.
   

Attribution theory tries to explain the ways in which we judge people differently, depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behavior. This theory suggests that when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused. Internally caused behaviors are those an observer believes to be under the personal behavioral control of another individual. Externally caused behavior is what we imagine the situation forced the individual to do.

There are three determining factors.

• Distinctiveness: refers to whether or not an individual displays different behaviors in different situations. High = external and low = internal.

• Consensus: everyone who faces a similar situation responds in the same way. The behavior shows then consensus. High = external and low = internal.

• Consistency: we can look for consistency in a person’s actions. High = internal and low = external.

Observation  interpretation  attribution of cause

Fundamental attribution error is when we underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal or personal factors.

When people tend to attribute ambiguous information as relatively flattering and accept positive feedback while rejecting negative feedback, we call this self-serving bias.

Selective perceptions allows us to speed-read others, but not without the risk of drawing an inaccurate picture. We see what we want to see.

When we draw a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic, such as intelligence, a halo effect is operating.
Contrast effect is operating when we don’t evaluate a person in isolation. Our reaction is influenced by other persons we have recently encountered.

Stereotyping is operating when we judge someone on the basis of our perception of the group to which he/she belongs.

Rational decision-making model: when the decision maker is thinking rational and makes consistent, value-maximizing choices. There is a six steps model.

Bounded rationality: if a human mind cannot formulate and solve complex problems with full rationality.
Perception and decision-making biases and heuristics are not necessarily bad. They allow us to process information more quickly and efficiently. The key is to be self-aware enough to see when a bias or short cut may be counterproductive.
Intuition: its perhaps the least rational way of making decisions. It’s an unconscious process created from distilled experience. It relies on holistic associations.

Common biases and errors in decision making

• Overconfidence bias: people who overestimate their performance and ability.

• Anchoring bias: a tendency to fixate on initial information and fail to adequately adjust for subsequent information.

• Confirmation bias: represents a specific case of selective perception.

• Availability bias: a tendency to base judgements on information readily available.

• Escalation of commitment: refers to staying with a decision even when there is clear evidence it’s wrong.

• Randomness error: the tendency to believe we can predict the outcome of random events.

• Risk aversion: the tendency to prefer a sure thing over a risky outcome.

• Hindsight bias: the tendency to believe falsely that we had have accurately predicted it, after the outcome is known.

Three ethical decision criteria

1. Utilitarianism: holding that the moral action is the one that maximizes utility. Utility is defined in various ways, including as pleasure, economic well-being and the lack of suffering.

2. To make decisions consistent with fundamental liberties and privileges, as set forth in the bill of rights. It protects whistle-blowers.

3. To impose and enforce rules fairly and impartially to ensure justice.

Creativity allows the decision maker to more fully appraise and understand the problem, including seeing problems others can’t see. It’s the ability to produce useful ideas.

Three-component model of creativity. Studies confirm that the higher the level of each, the higher the creativity.

• Expertise

• Creative-thinking skills

• Intrinsic task motivation

Chapter 7. Motivation I: basis concepts

We define motivation as the process that account for an individual’s intensity, direction, and persistence of effort towards attaining a goal. Now we focus on organizational goals. The three key elements are intention (how hard a person tries), direction (the effort is channelled) and persistence (how long a person can maintain effort).

The best-known theory of motivation is Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

1. Physiological: includes hunger, thirst, shelter, sex and other bodily needs.

2. Safety: security and protection from physical and emotional harm.

3. Social: affection, belongingness, acceptance and friendship.

4. Esteem: internal factors such as self-respect, autonomy and achievement. External factors such as status, recognition and attention.

5. Self-actualization: drive to become what we are capable of becoming.

Lower order needs: physiological and safety needs.
Higher order needs: social, esteem and self-actualization needs.
High order needs are satisfied internally (within the person), whereas lower order needs are satisfied externally (by things such as pay, union contracts and tenure).

Douglas McGregor proposed two distinct views of human beings: one basically negative (labelled theory X) and one basically positive (labelled theory Y). He concluded that the managers’ view of the nature of human beings are based on certain assumptions that mold the managers behavior toward the employees.
Under Theory X: managers believe employees inherently dislike work and must therefore be directed or even coerced into performing it. Theory X assumes higher-order needs dominate individuals.
Under Theory Y: managers assume employees can view work as being as natural as rest or play, and therefore the average person can learn to accept responsibility. Theory Y assumptions were more valid then Theory X.

Two Factor theory from Herzberg is also called motivation-hygiene theory. He said that believing an individual’s relationship to work is basic. So he asked the question ‘what do people want from their jobs?’
Intrinsic factors such as advancement, recognition, responsibility, and achievement seem related to job satisfaction.

Dissatisfied respondents tended to cite extrinsic factors, such as supervision, pay, company policies and working conditions. This methodology is limited and questionable. No overall measure of satisfaction was utilized.

McClelland’s theory of needs was developed by David McClelland and his associates. He looks at three needs.

• Needs for achievement (nAch) is the drive to excel, to achieve in relationship to a set of standards.

• Need for power (nPow) is the need to make others behave in a way they would not have otherwise.

• Need for affiliation (nAff) is the desire for friendly and close interpersonal relationships.

Self-determination theory: which proposes that people prefer to feel they have control over their actions. Much research on self-determination theory in OB has focused on cognitive evaluation theory. This theory hypothesizes that extrinsic rewards will reduce intrinsic interest in a task. When people are paid for work, it feels less like something they want to do and more like something they have to do.

Job engagement: the investment of an employee’s physical, cognitive and emotional energies into job performance.

In general, managers should make specific and difficult goals and they should set the highest goals to which employees will commit. Research on goal-setting theory in fact reveals impressive effects of goal specificity, challenge and feedback on performance.

A more systematic way to utilize goal-setting is with management by objectives (MBO). MBO emphasizes participatively set goals that are tangible, verifiable and measureable. Four ingredients are common to MBO programs: goal specificity, participation in decision making, an explicit time period and performance feedback.

Self-efficacy theory is also known as social cognitive theory or social learning theory. Managers will increase employee’s motivation by increasing their confidence in successfully completing the task. Self-efficacy can create a positive spiral.
Four ways self-efficacy can be increased by Bandura.

• Enactive mastery: gaining relevant experience with the task or job.

• Vicarious modelling: becoming more confident because you see somebody else doing the task.

• Verbal persuasion: becoming more confident because someone convince you that you have the skills to be successful.

• Arousal: leads to an energized state. The person gets psyched up, and performs better.

Pygmalion effect is the best way for a manager to use verbal persuation. It’s a form of self-fulfilling prophecy in which believing something can make it true.

The referent an employee selects adds to the complexity of equity theory. There are four referent comparisons.

• Self-inside: an employee’s experience in a different position inside the employee’s current organization.

• Self-outside: an employee’s experience in a situation or position outside the employee’s current organization.

• Other-inside: another individual or group of individuals inside the employee’s organization.

• Other-outside: another individual or group of individuals outside the employee’s organization.

Distribution justice: perceived fairness of outcome. ‘I got the pay raise I deserved.’
Procedural justice: perceived fairness of process used to determine outcome. ‘I had input into the process used to give raises and was given a good explanation of why I received the raise I did.’
Interactional justice: perceived degree to which one is treated with dignity and respect. ‘When telling me about my raise, my supervisor was very nice and complimentary.’

Organizational justice draws the bigger picture. Overall perception of what is fair in the workplace. For example ‘I think this is a fair place to work.’

To promote fairness in the workplace, managers should consider openly sharing information on how allocation decisions are made. Fair and open procedures are especially important when the outcome is likely to be viewed negatively by some or all employees.

Victor Vroom’s expectancy theory argues that the strength of our tendency to act a certain way depends on the strength of our expectation of a given outcome and its attractiveness. This theory focus on three relationships.

1. Effort-performance relationship: the probability perceived by the individual that exerting a given amount of effort will lead to performance.

2. Performance-reward relationship: the degree to which the individual believes performing at a particular level will lead to the attainment of a desired outcome.

3. Rewards-personal goals relationship: the degree to which organizations rewards satisfy an individual’s personal goals or needs and the attractiveness of those potential reward for the individual.

Individual effort > (1) > individual performance > (2) > organizational rewards > (3) > personal goals

Chapter 8. Motivation II: Applied Concepts

Job characteristics model (JCM): Any job can be described in five job dimensions:

1. Skill variety: The variety of skills that a job contains in which the worker can use his talent and personal skills

2. Task identity: The completeness of a job, so the degree to which you make a whole product or just a part of it

3. Task significance: The impact the job has on the lives of other people. A surgeon has a major impact, while the cafeteria worker has not

4. Autonomy: The freedom and independence that the job gives the worker

5. Feedback: The degree of feedback that the employee gets when he is done with his task. Making and testing an mp3 player gives high feedback, making a steering wheel gives low feedback

These five core job dimensions contribute to the critical psychological states and these states affect the personal and work outcomes. Thise relation is mediated by the employee growth-need strength.

Jobs can be redesigned by job rotation and job enrichment. Job rotation is the degree in which employees shift task with each other to avoid boredom and increase motivation. It gives employees the feeling that they really contribute something to the organization, because of the skills they need for all the different tasks. Job enrichmen is the degree of enrichment the job is for the employee in terms of planning control, execution and work evaluation.

Combining task (skill variety, task identity)

Form natural work units: By letting employees form natural work units, they create a meaningful whole and identify themselves with that. (task identity, task significance)

Establish client relationships: Establish the relationship between the clients and the employees. (skill variety, autonomy, feedback)

Expand jobs vertically: By giving employees more management tasks they gain more responsibility and control. (autonomy)

Open feedback channels (feedback)

These actions and their core dimensions are shown in Exhibit 7.2

Method of job enrichment:

Let stories of customers that benefited from the organization products enrich in the work of the employees.

Let employees help each other by sharing knowledge. This contributes to the employees’ motivation and they get a pro-active attitude towards the organization.

Flextime: Employees can organize en decide at which time they work, as long as they make enough hours during the week.

Job sharing: Two or more persons can divide the workload, payment, bonuses, etc, of a 40-hours workweek.

Telecommuting: A workweek in which an employee can work at least 2 days at home. There is a linkage between home and the office by a computer or the internet.

Employee involvement

Employee involvement: The use of employee’s ideas, feedback and other input in the organizations process to increase their commitment to the organization. In participative management, programs are based on joint decision making, in which subordinates share a significant degree of decision-making power. Representative management is redistributing power by putting labor on a more equal footing with the interests of management and stockholders. Counsils and board representatives are the two most common forms.

Also rewards can be use to create employee involvement.

What to pay? Internal equity is paying by the worth of the job to the organization. External equity is the external competitiveness of an organization’s pay relative to pay elsewhere in the industry.

How to pay? There are Variable pay program: Pay is portionately based on a measure of performance, speed, quality etc.

1. Piece-rate pay: A fixed sum for each product or unit that is completed

2. Merit-based pay: Pay is based on performance

3. Bonuses

4. Skill-based pay: Pay is based on the number of skills a employee has or the amount of jobs they can do

5. Profit sharing plans: The profit an organization has made determines the amount of pay. Profit can be cashed out as money or for example as stock options

6. Gain sharing: Calculations based on group productivity determines pay. Even when a company is not making profit, the employees can get bonuses.

7. Employee stock ownership plans (ESOP): Bonuses in terms of stock in the organization. This increases job satisfaction and motivates the employees because they are ‘owner’ of the organization.

Some employees can choose flexible benefits, by which they can decide which pay compensation suits them best.

Reward:

Intrinsic: Compliments, positive feedback, higher rank in hierarchy, etc

Extrinsic: Pay rise, bonuses, etc

Chapter 9. Groups

A group can be defined as two or more indivudals, interacting and interdepended, who come togheter to achieve particular objectives.

Formal: A group that has a formal, organizational structure, e.g. a work assignment group An Informal is a group that is not defined by the organization. Social contact. People join groups for security(reduce the feeling of standing alone), status, self-esteem(give an increased feeling of worth), affiliation(fulfill social needs), power and goal achievement.

Command group: A hierarchy in which people carry out orders from the management, or top. They need to report to the management.

Task group: A temporary group of members that need to fulfill the same task or take part in an action.

Friends group: Group that can be based on common age or ethnic heritage etc.

Five-stage model of group development: Framework in understanding the development of groups

1. Forming: The group is not ready made and there are no roles with regard to leadership and other structural components.
   Forming stage is done when members identify themselves with the group.

2. Storming: The existence of the group is accepted, but there is still no clear view of who is going to lead the group and what its structure is. There arises a conflict in the group.
   Completed when the conflict is almost over and made an agreement about the hierarchy of leadership.

3. Norming: Group cohesiveness makes the group closer and relationships between members start to exist. The group’s identity becomes clearer.
   Norming is completed when the structure in the group is clear and the expectations of the group are set. Members know what behavior is accepted in the group.

4. Performing: The group is now fully accepted and the structure is completely defined. The group is interacting with each other and the group energy is high.

5. Adjourning: The group is getting ready to separate.

There are some properties stat shape members’ behavior and help explain and predict individual behavior within the group as well as the group performance.

Group property 1 Roles: A behavior that is expected in a given situation and has special patterns.

Role perception: How we think that we should act in a given situation

Role expectation: How others think we should act in a given

Role conflict: When there are two roles that are desirable and they don’t fit each other.

Group property 2 Norms: Beliefs about the behavior of people in certain situations. How they should and should not behave.

Performance norms: The workload you need to take, what output level is desired, etc.

Appearance norms: Norms about how you should appear in a given situation. A gala has another dress code than a job interview.

Social arrangements norms: Norms about friendship forming, the reaction to a given social situation like funeral and birth, etc.

Resource allocation norms: Arrangements of overtime work, assignment of projects, new equipment, etc.

Hawtorne studies: An employee is likely to maximize behavior or output in response to being investigated. He will feel special because he is part of an experiment.

Conformity: Degree of conformity and belonging to a group. Research has shown that conformity can be a problem in groups. The Solomon Asch studies: A study in which a group is faced with a question with an easy answer. In the group is one member who will say the wrong answer on purpose so the group conformity can be studied. When the group is following the wrong answer, though they know the wright answer, there is a high conformity in the group. Managers should encourage group leaders to actively seek input from all members and avoid expressing their own opinions.

Deviant workplace behavior: Voluntary behavior that harms norms and values of an organization and this is a threat to the organization and his members. When deviant workplace norms surface, employee cooperation, commitment and motivations are likely to suffer. Backstabbing, employee silence, cyber loafing, etc.

Group property 3 Status: The position someone has in the society or in a group. Status is a significant motivator and has major behavioral consequences when indivuals perceive a disparity between their own believe and others perceptions.

Status is derived from the power a persons wields over others, a person’s ability to contribute to a group’s goals and an individual’s personal characteristics.

Group property 4 Size:

Large groups have many members so there are many members that can gain input. This results in diverse input. A small group has not so much input and so they are better in do something with that input and be more productive. Research has shown that groups of 7 the most effective are in taking action and gaining input.

Social loafing: People in groups are inclined to spend less effort in the work than they could have done when they worked alone. The productivity from the whole group is not equal to the sum of the productivity of the different group members.

Try to minimize social loafing in groups by:

• Give the group a goal, so they have a goal to strive to

• Make the group members competitive in the group

• Let the evaluation from a group member be done through another group member

• Only select group members that want to be productive, motivated and function best when they work in groups

• Give individual rewards

Group property 5 Cohesiveness: When the individuals feel a bond with each other and want to stay in the group. If performance-related norms for quality, output and cooperation with outsiders are high, a high cohesive group will be more productive than a less cohesive group.

How to motivate cohesiveness;

• Small groups

• Let the group goals be provocative and motivate the group members to join the group

• Let members spend a lot of time together so they can get bonds with each other

• Let membership be special and make the groups status high, so attending and leaving the group will be hard.

• Let the group compete with other groups

• Give group rewards

• Isolate the group from other groups, physically

Group decision making:

Strengths: Much variety in standpoints, information and knowledge and a solution that is quicker and easier accepted

Weaknesses: Groups have leaders that can dominate the decision, the group can has struggles to come to consensus

Group decision making can sometimes lead to worse dicisions than individual decision making. Two phonomenons who describe this are groupthinking and groupshift.

Groupthink: Groups strive to harmony and conformity within the group, this results in situations where not all evaluations are judged critically and not all ideas are discussed. Group shift(polarization): People take greater risks when they act in a group, because the shared risk is lower than the individual risk.

Techniques that can be used for decision making:

Brainstorming: a solution to a problem is found by giving all alternatives and possible solutions, which generates new ideas but is not very efficient.

Nominal group technique: People in a group first think about ideas and then present them, whereby the other members silently and independently rank-order the ideas. The difference with brain storming is that the discussion is restricted.

Interacting groups: A group that communicates face to face with verbal and nonverbal expressions.

Chapter 10. Teams

In the last decades teams have become more popular because teams are more flexible and responsive to changing events than traditional departments. Not only because their composition, teams are preferable, but also in the motivational aspect. So teams are an effective way to democratize organizations and to increase the motivation of the employee.

There is a difference between a group and a team. A work group is a collective of any size that interacts primarily to share information and make decisions to help each member perform within his area of responsibility. The performance of this group is based on the performance of each group member as individual. In a Work team, the individual performances result in a greater total performance than the sum of all the individual input. So the group members are making each other better. The characteristics of both:

Work groups:

• Goal: to share information

• Synergy: neutral

• Accountability: individual

• Skills: random and varied

Work teams:

• Goal: collective performance

• Synergy: positive

• Accountability: individual and mutual

• Skills: Complementary

Every different project requires a different type of team. There are some basic types of teams. First, the problem-solving team, which is focused on one aspect of the organization, and has the authority to unilaterally implement any of their suggestions; Everyone brings his own input on one topic. Second, Self-Managed Work Teams, which can be described as groups of employees who perform highly related or interdependent jobs and who take on the responsibilities of their former supervisors; everyone is connected with each other, and together you are working to a performance. Cross-Functional teams consist of employees of the same hierarchical level, but from different work areas. These employees are put together to give their own perspective and the team is made to accomplish a task.

Cross-functional teams are useful in creative situations and to coordinate complex problems. Although, it is more difficult to manage these teams because of the high degree of diversity. At last, Virtual Teams, they make use of computer technology to unite physically dispersed members and achieve a common goal. There is more challenge because the less social and interaction among members.

The team effectiveness model shows the three components of effective teams: contextual influences, composition and process. Contextual influences can be categorized in four factors. Adequate resources is the degree in which a team is able to fulfill their tasks without scarcity of resources. Leadership and structure is the fact in which an employee agrees with the distribution of tasks and workload. Leadership is important in multiteam systems to make sure that teams work together rather than against each other. Climate of trust is the degree of trust in other members and leaders. Trust among team members enables cooperation and reduces the need to monitor each others’ behavior. Performance evaluations and reward systems is the factor which describes how members are both individually and jointly accounted for their performance. Managers should focus on the performance of the team and develop a rewarding system in which this type of rewarding is possible.

Team composition exists of seven factors. The first one is the abilities of members, which can be seen as a predictor of the team performance. A team performance is more complex than the sum of the individual performances, but the individual abilities set the limit for the team performance. Personality of members influences the team performance because of the fact that people are influencing each other and having an extreme disagreeable member in your team can decrease the team performance. The allocation of roles is important because matching individual preferences with team role demands will increase the probability that team members will work together. A team has different needs and therefore there are different roles in a team, which all should be filled with a suitable member. Diversity of members is desirable in several situations, but up to a particular level. The size of the team is influencing the performance. Most effective teams consists of five to nine people, use the smallest number of members to accomplish the goals. Member preferences is the degree in which your team consist of social workers of individually focused workers.

The Team Processes is the final category related to team effectiveness and has five influencing factors. A common plan and purpose helps effective teams to guide their actions and concentrates their energies. Reflexivity is the degree in which a team is able to reflect on changes and adjust their master plan. Specific goals facilitate clear communication and help teams to maintain their focus on getting results. Team efficacy is the believe of teams to succeed their tasks. Rising your believes motivates you to work harden. Mental models are the representations of the key elements within team’s environment that team members share. Conflict levels gives the amount of conflicts. Relationship conflicts are always dysfunctional, task conflicts can be useful by leading to a better final decision. Finally, social loafing is the degree in which your individual effort is noted.

Many people are not team players. To create a team with team players, a manager can use these tools:

• Selecting: hiring team players by making sure that candidates can fulfill their team role.

• Training: creating team players by experiences of satisfied teamwork.

• Rewarding: providing incentives to be a good team player by a rewarding system which encourage cooperative efforts rather than competitive ones.

Chapter 11. Communication Process

A communication process includes:

• Sender: initiates a message by encoding a thought.
• Encoding
• Message: the actual physical product.
• Channel: the medium through which the message travels. There are formal and informal channels. The sender selects the channel.
• Decoding: translating the symbols into understandable form.
• Receiver: the person who receives the massage.
• Noise: communication barriers
• Feedback: the check on how successful the message has been sent.

Downward communication is communication that flows from one level of a group or organization to a lower level. Managers use it to assign goals, provide job instructions and to explain policies and procedures. Upward communication flows to a higher level in the group or organization. managers rely on upward communication for ideas on how conditions can be improved. Lateral communication (horizontal) is when communication takes place among members of the same work group, workers at the same level or any other horizontally equivalent workers.

Oral, written and non-verbal communication forms or mediums of communication have their unique purposes, and specific limitations.

The informal communication network in a group or organization is called grapevine.
Formal organizational networks can be very complicated. To simplify, these networks are condensed into three common small groups of five people.

• Chain: follows the formal chain of command (for example in three-level organizations).
• Wheel: relies on a central figure to act as the conduit for all group communication (for example a team with a strong leader).
• All channel: permits all group members to actively communicate with each other (for example self-managed teams).

Examples of electronic communication mediums are e-mail, text messaging, networking software, blogs and videoconferencing.

Barriers to effective communication
1. Filtering: refers to a sender’s purposely manipulating information so the receiver will see it more favorably.
2. Selective perception: we interpret what we see and call it reality.
3. Information overload: individuals have a finite capacity for processing data.
4. Emotions
5. Language
6. Silence
7. Communication apprehension: people who found in extremely difficult to speak with other face-to-face or have to call somebody, reply on emails etc.
8. Lying

Cultural barriers
Researchers have identified a number of problems related to language difficulties in cross-cultural communication. These are barriers caused by semantics, connotations and tone differences. The fourth are differences in tolerance for conflict and methods for resolving conflicts.

Cultures tend to differ in the degree to which context influence the meaning individuals take from communication, the cultural context. In high-context cultures people rely heavily on nonverbal and subtle situational cues in communicating with others, For example China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. In low-context cultures people rely essentially on spoken and written words to convey meaning. For example Europe and North Amerika.

Chapter 12. Leadership

Leadership: Organizing and influencing a group to achieve of a common goal. Non-sanctioned leaders are leaders that can influence groups though they are not formal appointed as leaders. In the quick chancing world of today, a leader can influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or set of goals.

Trait theories of leadership: Using the Big Five to identify and order the traits of leadership. Characteristics of people can forecast leadership and so the Big Five can be used as a way to predict leadership. But, someone with the desired leader characteristics can theoretically be a good leader, but that doesn’t mean that he is in practice. Research has shown that extraversion is the most important trait of effective leaders, but this trait is more related to leader emergence than to leader effectiveness. Also conscientiousness and openness to experience have a (mild) relationship to leader effectiveness. People are more likely to follow someone who is confident.

Behavioral theories of leadership implied that people can be trained to become leaders. Important characteristics are initiating structure and consideration. Initiating structure: When a leader defines and structures his role as leader and the role that the employees have. The structured can include the behavior towards work organization, the relationships with the employees and the goals that the leader needs to accomplish.

Consideration: The leader needs to gain the trust and the respect of the employees and needs to deal with feelings they have. It is necessary that the leader helps employees with problems, which can be personal, all employees must be treated equally, etc.
Fieldler contingency model: The leader needs to find the perfect balance between his leadership style and the degree of control he has in a given situation.

Least preferred co-worker (LPC) questionnaire: To identify the leadership style a person has, Fieldler thinks that it is necessary to measure the degree of orientation a leader has, task or relationship.
The questionnaire is a rating method - a scale from 1-8 for each of 16 sets of adjectives - to gain insight of the leader is task or relationship oriented. He is asked to think of the employee he least preferred and to rate that person.

Fieldler considers a leader as relationship oriented when the LPC is high, and task oriented when the LPC is low.

Fieldler then evaluates the leadership of the leader in terms of three variables, the relations of the leader and member, tasks and the power the leader has on salary, promotions, etc. These three variables have impact on the control of the leader. The Fieldler model is matching these leadershipstyles and situations in one model. (See exhibit 11.1 for an example)

Leader-member exchange theory (LMX): Due to time pressure, leaders will always have a small group that they favor. They get a more special relationship with them, than with the other employees. Leaders are unnoticed rewarding the one they like, and punishing those who they don’t like. This judgment is probably based on demographic, attitude and personality characteristics.

Leadershipstyles

Charismatic leadership: The leadership based on charisma. The followers of this leadership are impressed by the heroic leadership style of the leaders. The characteristics of this leadership are vision and articulation, personal risk, sensitivity to follower needs and unconventional behavior.

The process to become a charismatic leader, three steps;

1. Get charisma. Charisma can not be learned, but if one has an optimistic view, is enthusiast and communicates with his body in stead of only words, then he can come a long way

2. Inspire others

3. Play on the emotions of potential followers
    

But how do charismatic leaders actually involve followers? They have a vision. They link the present to a better future and set goals accordingly. They implement the vision and make sure that they make people believe they can attain these visions. This ensures self-confident and self-esteem. They let the followers imitate. They set values and norms so the followers can identify themselves with the leader. Finally, encourage the vision and convince people of the vision by emotions.

Transactional leaders: Leadership based on tasks and roles. Clear tasks and roles will inspire the people to follow the leader. Characteristics of transactional leadership are contingent reward(rewards for performance), management by exception(active if he/she watches and searches for deviations from rules, passive if he/she intervenses only if standards are not met) and laissez-faire(avoids making decisions, abdicates responsibilities).

Transformational leader: Followers can be inspired when they see that the leader self has good intentions for the organization. The 4 I’s are Idealized Influence(vision and sense of mission) Insprational motivation(communcaties high expectations), Intellectual Stimulation( promotes intelligence and carful problem solving) and Indiviualized consideration(giers personal attention, treats each employee individually and advises). There is discussion if there is a difference between charismatic and transformational leader, a small difference could be that a charismatic leader want his followers to adopt the charismatic’s world view and go nu further. A transformational leader will attempt to instill in followers the ability to question not only established view but eventually those established by the leader.

Mediocore leader: When you do have transactional leadership qualities, but don’t have transformational leadership qualities. Transactional leadership continues on the transformational leadership.

The Full Range of Leadership model shows the leadership styles from ineffective to effective and from passive to active. (Full range of leadership model is shown in Exhibit 11.5)

Authentic leader: Leaders that base successful leadership on their believes, their values and ethics. They gain trust.

Socialized charismatic leadership: Leadership that is based on the values of others, on conducting ethical. They try to convey the values of the followers with their own values in mind. Like the Dutch government.

Trust: When you have positive expectations about another and are willing to take risk and disadvantage. With trust in organizations it is easier to gain information and it makes groups more functional and productive. Trust encourages taking risks, facilitates information sharing, makes groups more effective and enhances the productivity.
Attribution theory of leadership: It is not the status leadership that makes a person a leader. It is important that a leader focuses on the outcomes and goals instead of being the best leader. Attribution theory states that it is important to project the appearance of being a leader, rather than focusing on actual accomplishments.

The Substitutes for leadership are the things that can replace the requirement of a leader, for example experience and training. Neutralizers make it impossible for leader behavior to make any difference to follower outcomes.

Identification-based trust: Trust that is based on the field of identification with others. If your wants and needs are the same as that of another, it is likely that you identify yourself with him and trust him because you trust yourself and your own needs and wants.

Chapter 13. Power and Politics

Power refers to a capacity that A has to influence the behavior of B, so B acts in accordance with A’s wishes. The most important aspect of power is dependence. Dependence is based on alternatives B perceives and the importance B places on the alternatives A controls. The differences between power and leadership is that leadership requires some congruence between the goals of the leader and those being led. Power does not require goal compatibility, merely dependence.

Bases of power

• Formal power is based on an individual’s position in an organization.

• Coercive power base depends on fear of the negative results from failing to comply.

• Reward power: with which people comply because it produces positive benefits.

• Legitimate power: the formal authority to control and to use organizational resources.

• Personal power can be divided into expert power and referent power.

There are nine power tactics people can use to translate power bases into specific actions.

1. Legitimacy

2. Rational persuasion

3. Inspirational appeals

4. Consolation

5. Exchange

6. Personal appeals

7. Ingratiation

8. Pressure

9. Coalitions

When employees in organizations convert their power into action, we describe them as being engaged in politics. Organizational politics focuses on the use of power to affect decision making in an organization, or on self-serving and organizationally unsanctioned behaviors.

Employees who have poor political skills or are unwilling to play the politics game generally relate perceived organizational politics to:

• Decreased job satisfaction

• Increased anxiety and stress

• Increased turnover

• Reduced performance

Impression management (IM) is an specific type of political behavior, designed to alter other’s immediate perceptions of us. Evidence suggests that the effectiveness of impression management techniques depends on the setting (self-promotion works better in the interview than for performance evaluation).

Chapter 14. conflict and negotiations

We can define conflict as a process that begins when one party perceives another party has or is about to negatively affect something first party cares about. Conflict is an inherent part of organizational life. Some level of conflict is probably necessary for optimal organizational functioning.
Task conflict is more constructive than process, or relationship conflicts.

The contribution of the interactionist view of conflict is recognizing that a minimal level of conflict can help keep a group viable, self-critical, and creative. Functional conflict supports the goals of the group and improves its performance. A conflict that hinders a group performance is a destructive or dysfunctional conflict.
Task conflicts relates to the content and goals of the work. Relationship conflict focuses on interpersonal relationships. Process conflict relates to how the work gets done.

Conflict process has five stages

1. Potential opposition or incompatibility: antecedent conditions (communication, structure and personal variables).

2. Cognition and personalization: perceived or felt conflict (when individuals emotions are involved).

3. Intentions: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating.

4. Behavior: party’s behavior or other’s reaction.

5. Outcomes: increased or decreased group performance.

We can define negotiation as a process that occurs when two or more parties decide how to allocate scare resources. The most effective negotiators utilize different tactics for distributive and integrative bargaining.

By fixed pie, we mean a set amount of goods or services to be divvied up. When the pie is fixed, they tend to bargain distributively.

BATNA means Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. Your BATNA determines the lowest value acceptable to you for a negotiated agreement.

Chapter 15. Structure and Organizational Behavior

Organization structure defines how job tasks are formally divided, grouped and coordinated. There are six key elements which are part of this structure:

1. Work specialization: the degree to which activities in the organization are divided into separate jobs. There need to be a balance between the positive economic effects of work specialization and the negative problems when it is carried too far.

2. Departmentalization: the basis in which jobs are grouped. There are different ways to group activities: by function, product or service, geography and type of customer.

3. Chain of command: the unbroken line of authority that extends from the top of the organization to the lowest echelon and clarifies who reports to whom. Authority is the right to give orders and expect them to be obeyed. Unity of command says that a person should have only one supervisor to prevent the concept of an unbroken line of authority.

4. Span of control: the amount of employees a manager can manage efficiently and effectively. The wider the span, the more efficient the organization.

5. Centralization/decentralization: centralization is the degree to which decision making is concentrated at a single point in the organization. In a centralized organization, the managers make all decisions, which is faster. In a decentralized organization, decision making is pushed down to the managers closest to the action, which gives often a more useful solution.

6. Formalization: the degree to which jobs within the organization are standardized.

In a simple structure is a low degree of departmentalization, wide spans of control, authority centralized and little formalization. It is a flat organization. Advantages of this structure are the flexibility, speed, inexpensive to operate and the accountability is clear. Disadvantage is the fact that the organization becomes more inefficient as an organization grows because of the low formalization and high degree of centralization.

The bureaucracy is characterized by high routine, specialization, strictly formalized rules, tasks group into functional departments, centralized authority, narrow spans of control and decision making that follows the chain of command. The strengths of this structure are the ability to perform very efficient because of economies of scale, minimum duplication of people and similarity among employees.

The weaknesses of this structure are the fact that bureaucracy can create conflicts in which functional-unit goals get more attention than the overall goals of the organization, and the obsessive concern with following the rules.

The Matrix Structure combines the functional and product forms of departmentalization. Where functional departmentalization is very useful in pooling and sharing resources, is it very weak in coordinating tasks of diverse functional specialists. Product departmentalization is the opposite of functional departmentalization and achieves budget targets and on-time completion, but has the disadvantage that shared resources are not used to create more efficiency. The matrix structure is combining these two departmentalizations and uses the advantages of both. Advantage of this structure is that it facilitates the coordination when the organization has complex and interdependent activities. It can also achieve economies of scale and allocation of specialists. Major disadvantage is the fact that the Matrix Structure is often paired with a lot of confusion, struggles and stress.

The virtual organization is a small, core organization that outsources its major business functions. This organization is highly centralized and has almost no departmentalization. The organization is divided into several modules and together they create a network: the organization. The organization outsourced the primary functions to these modules. The core job of the organization is to coordinate the performances of these modules and to combine the activities to the final product/service. The strengths of this virtual organization are the flexibility, which makes it possible for smaller organizations to compete with the big ones, and the costs, because there are no permanent offices or hierarchical roles. The weakness of a virtual organization is that there is less commitment: culture alignment and shared goals can be lost because of the low degree of interaction among members.

The Boundaryless organization eliminates vertical (flat organization) and horizontal boundaries (create interaction among functions, product lines and units) and thereby breaks down external barriers between the company and the customers and suppliers. It has no chain of command, limitless spans of control and empowered teams. Also the geographic barriers are broken by a boundaryless organization. Strategic alliances reduce the distinction between the organization and the third party.

The Leaner Organization

Downsizing is a systematic effort to make an organization leaner by closing locations, reducing staff or selling off business units that don’t add value. Reducing the amount of employees gives lower-wage costs, but downsizing doesn’t always lead to an incline of the stock prices. Because of the negative employee attitude, the commitment to the organization and job satisfaction decrease. To reduce these negative effects, there are some effective strategies for downsizing:

• Investment: investing in high-involvement work practices lead to more effectiveness.

• Communication: Clear communication to the employees reduces stress and worries among them.

• Participation: when employees can participate in the process, they are less worried.

• Assistance: when a company is willing to invest in employees’ assistance, they demonstrate their care and this will lead to positive reactions.

Organizational design can be classified into two models, the mechanistic model and the organic model. The mechanistic model is highly specialized, inflexible departmentalization, has a clear chain of command and a narrow span of control, is centralized and has a high degree of formalization. The organic model consists of cross-functional teams, has a free flow of information, a wide span of control, is decentralized and has a low formalization.

Innovation strategy strives to achieve meaningful and unique innovations. This can be reached by a mechanistic structure, well-developed communication channels, and long-term commitment. A cost-minimization strategy controls costs, removes unnecessary expanses and cuts prices in selling a basic product. The imitation strategy tries to minimize risk and maximize opportunity for profit.

Technology is the way an organization transfers inputs into outputs. The difference among technologies is the degree of routineness, which is characterized by standardized operations.

The Environment consists of all the extern parties a company has to deal with or that have an influence on their performance. There are three dimensions, capacity is the degree to which the environment can support growth, Volatility is the degree of instability in the environment, and complexity is the degree of heterogeneity and concentration among environmental elements.

External boundaries can be reduced by globalization, strategic alliances, customer-organization links and telecommuting.

Chapter 16. Organizational culture

Organizational culture refers to a system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes the organization from other organizations. An organization’s culture develops over many years and is rooted in deeply held values to which employees are strongly committed. There are seven characteristics.

1. Innovation and risk taking

2. Attention to detail

3. Outcome orientation

4. People orientation

5. Team orientation

6. Aggressiveness

7. Stability

Culture is a descriptive term. This is important because it differentiates culture from job satisfaction.

Most large organizations have a dominant culture and numerous subcultures. A dominant culture expresses the core values a majority of members share and that give the organization its distinct personality. Subcultures tend to develop in large organizations to reflect common problems or experiences members face in the same department or location.

The culture is strong if most employees have the same opinions about the organization’s mission and values. If opinions vary widely, there’s a weak culture.

In a strong culture, the organization’s core values are both intensely held and widely shared. A strong culture should reduce employee turnover, because it demonstrates high agreement about what the organization represents. High formalization creates predictability, orderliness, and consistency.

Culture has a boundary defining role. It creates distinctions between one organization and others.

Organizational climate refers to the shared perceptions organizational members have about their organization and work environment. This aspect of culture is like team spirit in an organization. A lot of dimensions of climate have been studied, including safety, justice, diversity, and customer service. A positive overall workplace climate has been linked to higher customer satisfaction and financial performance as well.

When an organization undergoes institutionalization, it takes on a life of its own, apart from its founders or members. Becomes institutionalized that is, it is valued for itself and not for the goods or services it produces.

Culture is a liability when shared values don’t agree with those that further the organization’s effectiveness.
 

How a culture begins. Culture creation occurs in three ways.

1. Founders hire and keep only employees who think and feel the same way they do.

2. They indoctrinate and socialize these employees to their way of thinking and feeling.

3. The founder’ own behavior encourage employees to identify with them and internalize their beliefs.

Keeping a culture alive. Three forces play a particularly important part in sustaining a culture.

• Selection. The explicit goal of the selection process is to identify and hire individuals with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform successfully. Selection also provides information to applicants.

• Top management. The actions of top management also have a major impact on the organization’s culture. Through words and behavior, senior executives establish norms that filter through the organization.

• Socialization. New employees need help adapting to the prevailing culture. That help is socialization.

We can think of socialization as a process with three stages: prearrival, encounter and metamorphosis. This process has an impact on the new employee’s work productivity, commitment to the organization’s objectives and the decision to stay with the organization.

• Prearrival stage recognizes that each individual arrives with a set of values, attitudes and expectations about the work and the organization. People use the pre arrival stage to inform prospective employees about the organization.

• Encounter stage: new members enters the encounter stage and confronts the possibility that expectations may differ from reality.

• Metamorphosis stage. This are alternatives designed to bring about the desired metamorphosis.

The three-part entry socialization process is complete when new members have internalized and accepted the norms of the organization and their work group, are confident in their competence, and feel trusted and valued by their peers.
How employees learn culture. Culture is transmitted to employees in a number of forms.

• Stories

• Rituals are repetitive sequences of activities that express and reinforce the key values of the organization.

• Material symbols. For example, the layout of corporate headquarters, the types of automobiles top executives are given, and the presence or absence of corporate aircraft.

• Language

It is possible to form ethical cultures and positive organizational cultures, but the means by which such cultures are attained are quite different. A positive organizational culture emphasizes building on employee strengths, rewards more than it punishes, and emphasizes individual vitality and growth.

Organizational culture and national culture are not the same thing, through to some degree, an organization’s culture reflects the dominant values of its host country. As a manager, you can shape the culture of your work environment, sometimes as much as it shapes you. All managers can especially do their part to create an ethical culture.

Chapter 17. Organizational Change

There are a few forces for change:

• Changing nature of the workforce.

• Economic shocks

• Competition

• Social trends

• World politics

One of the most well-documented findings from studies of individual and organizational behavior is that organizations and their members resist change. You can find individual and organization sources on page 291 exhibit 17-1.

There are eight tactics that can help change agents deal with resistance to change:

• Education and communication

• Participation

• Building support and commitment

• Develop positive relationships

• Implementing changes fairly

• Manipulation and cooptation. Manipulation refers to covert influence attempts. Cooptation combines manipulation and participation.

• Selecting people who accept change

• Coercion. The application of direct threats or force on the resisters.

Several approaches to manage organizational cultures, Lewin’s classic three-step model of the change process, Kotter’s eight-step plan, action research and organizational development.

Kurt Lewin argued that successful change should follow three steps: unfreezing the status quo, movement to a desired end state, and refreezing the new change to make it permanent (see exhibited 17-2/3 page 294). The driving forces, which direct behavior away from the status quo, can be increased. The restraining forces, which hinder movement away from equilibrium (status quo), can be decreased.

John Kotter built on Lewin’s three-step model to create a more detailed approach for implementing change. He began by listing common mistakes managers make when trying to initiate change. See for his eight-step model exhibit 17-4.
Organization development (OD) is a collection of change methods that try to improve organizational effectiveness and employee well-being. The change agent may take the lead in OD, but there is a strong emphasis on collaboration. These are underlying values in most OD efforts.

• Respect for people

• Trust and support

• Power equalization

• Confrontation

• Participation

What are some OD techniques or interventions for bringing about change?

• Survey feedback is a tool for assessing attitudes held by organizational members, identifying discrepancies among member perceptions, and solving these differences.

• Process consultation: the purpose of PC is for an outside consultant to assist a client, usually a manager, to perceive, understand and act upon process events with which the manager must deal.

• Team building: uses high-interaction group activities to increase thrust and openness.

• Intergroup development: seeks to change group’ attitudes, stereotypes, and perceptions about each other.

• Appreciative inquiry: they identify a problem or a set of problems. Then look for a solution.

Various approaches can be used to manage organizational change and for developing a culture for change. It is unlikely one approach is always best in every situation.

Innovation is a new idea applied to initiating or improving a product, process or service. It’s a more specialized kind of change.

Structural variables have been the most studied potential source of innovation. A comprehensive review of the structure-innovation relationship leads to the following conclusions.

1. Organic structures positively influence innovation.

2. Long tenure in management is associated with innovation.

3. Innovation is nurtured when there are slack resources.

4. Interunit communication is high in innovative organizations.

Stress is a dynamic condition in which an individual is confronted with an opportunity, demand, or resource related to what the individual desires and for which the outcome is perceived to be both uncertain and important.

Challenge stressors are associated with workload, pressure to complete tasks, and time urgency. Hindrance stressors keep you from reaching your goals. Stress is associated with demands and resources. Demands are responsibilities, pressures, obligations and uncertainties’. Resources are things within an individual’s control that he can use to resolve the demands.

Stress has a few consequences

• Physiological symptoms, heart and bleeding rates increase, headaches, blood pressure, and can include heart attacks.

• Psychological symptoms, tension, anxiety, irritability, boredom and procrastination.

• Behavior symptoms, eating habits or increased smoking, sleep disorders