What Is Organizational

Behavior?
 Importance of
Interpersonal Skills in the Workplace
• Understanding of OB helps in determining
manager effectiveness
• Leadership and communication skills become
more critical as a person progresses in his or her
career
• Better interpersonal skills result in lower turnover
of quality employees and higher quality
applications for recruitment
• ‘Good places to work’ have better financial
performance
Manager – Functions and Roles
• Manager: Someone who gets things done through
other people in organizations.

➢ Organization: A consciously coordinated social

unit composed of two or more people that
functions on a relatively continuous basis to
achieve a common goal or set of goals.
➢ Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.

• Mintzberg concluded that managers perform ten

different, highly interrelated roles or sets of
behaviors attributable to their jobs.
Manager’s Skills
• Management Skills
• Technical Skills – the ability to apply specialized
knowledge or expertise. All jobs require some
specialized expertise, and many people develop
their technical skills on the job.
• Human Skills – the ability to work with,
understand, and motivate other people, both
individually and in groups.
• Conceptual Skills – the mental ability to analyze
and diagnose complex situations.
Effective Vs Successful Managerial
Activities
• Luthans and his associates found that all managers
engage in four managerial activities:
• Traditional management
• Communication
• Human resource management
• Networking
Effective Vs Successful Managerial
Activities
 Organizational Behavior
• Organizational behavior (OB) is a field of study that
investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and
structure have on behavior within organizations for
the purpose of applying such knowledge toward
improving an organization’s effectiveness.
OB is a Systematic Study
.
• Systematic Study of Behavior
• Behavior generally is predictable if we know how the
person perceived the situation and what is important
to him or her.
• Evidence-Based Management (EBM)
• Complements systematic study.
• Argues for managers to make decisions based on
evidence.
• Intuition
• Systematic study and EBM add to intuition, or those
“gut feelings” about “why I do what I do” and “what
makes others tick.”
• If we make all decisions with intuition or gut instinct,
we’re likely working with incomplete information.
 Major Behavioral Science Disciplines That
Contribute to OB
• Psychology
• Psychology seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes
change the behavior of humans and other animals.
• Learning, training, decision making, employee selection

• Social Psychology
• Social psychology blends the concepts of psychology and
sociology.
• Change, communication, group interactions

• Sociology
• Sociology studies people in relation to their social
environment or culture.
• Group behavior, organizational culture

• Anthropology
• Anthropology is the study of societies to learn about
human beings and their activities.
• Values, attitudes, behaviors
Major Behavioral Science Disciplines That
Contribute to OB
Challenges & Opportunities of OB
 Challenges and Opportunities of
OB Concepts
1. Economic pressure
• In tough economic times, effective
management is an asset.
• In good times, understanding how to reward,
satisfy, and retain employees is at a premium.
• In bad times, issues like stress, decision
making, and coping come to the forefront.
 Challenges and Opportunities of
OB Concepts
2. Globalization
• Increased foreign assignments.
• Working with people from different cultures.
• Overseeing movement of jobs to countries with
low-cost labor.
• Adapting to differing cultural and regulatory
norms.
 Challenges and Opportunities of
OB Concepts
3. Workforce diversity
• Organizations are becoming more
heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, race,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, and inclusion of
other diverse groups.
 Challenges and Opportunities of
OB Concepts
4. Customer service
• Service employees have substantial interaction
with customers.
• Employee attitudes and behavior are associated
with customer satisfaction.
• Need a customer-responsive culture.
 Challenges and Opportunities of
OB Concepts
5. Improving people skills
• People skills are essential to managerial
effectiveness.
• OB provides the concepts and theories that
allow managers to predict employee behavior
in given situations.
 Challenges and Opportunities of
OB Concepts
6. Networked organizations
• Networked organizations are becoming more
pronounced.
• A manager’s job is fundamentally different in
networked organizations.
• Challenges of motivating and leading “online”
require different techniques.
 Challenges and Opportunities of
OB Concepts
7. Employee well-being at work
• The creation of the global workforce means
work no longer sleeps.
• Communication technology has provided a
vehicle for working at any time or any place.
• Employees are working longer hours per week.
• The lifestyles of families have changed —
creating conflict.
• Balancing work and life demands now surpasses
job security as an employee priority.
 Challenges and Opportunities of
OB Concepts
8. Work environment
• Creating a positive work environment can be a
competitive advantage.
• Positive organizational scholarship is concerned
with how organizations develop human strength,
foster vitality and resilience, and unlock potential.
• This field of study focuses on employees’ strengths
versus their limitations, as employees share
situations in which they performed at their personal
best.
 Challenges and Opportunities of
OB Concepts
9. Ethical behavior
• Ethical dilemmas and ethical choices are
situations in which an individual is required to
define right and wrong conduct.
• Good ethical behavior is not so easily defined.
• Organizations distribute codes of ethics to guide
employees through ethical dilemmas.
• Managers need to create an ethically healthy
climate.
Three Levels of Analysis in OB Model
Three Levels of Analysis in OB Model
Inputs - Inputs are factors that exist in advance of
the employment relationships.
➢ Defined as the variables like personality,
group structure, and organizational
culture that lead to processes.
➢ Group structure, roles, and team
responsibilities are typically assigned
immediately before or after a group is
formed.
➢ Organizational structure and culture
change over time.
Three Levels of Analysis in OB Model

Processes - Processes are actions that

individuals, groups, and organizations engage in
as a result of inputs, and that lead to certain
outcomes.
➢ If inputs are like the nouns in
organizational behavior, processes are
like verbs.
➢ Defined as actions that individuals,
groups, and organizations engage in as
a result of inputs, and that lead to
certain outcomes.
Three Levels of Analysis in OB Model

➢ Outcomes
➢ Defined as the key variables that
you want to explain or predict, and
that are affected by some other
variables.
 Outcome Variables
1. Attitudes and stress
• Employee attitudes are the evaluations employees
make, ranging from positive to negative, about
objects, people, or events.
• Stress is an unpleasant psychological process that
occurs in response to environmental pressures.
 Outcome Variables
2. Task performance
• The combination of effectiveness and efficiency at
doing your core job tasks is a reflection of your level of
task performance.
• Effeciency
a) Maximum output with minimum input
b) Considers the present state
c) Doing things consistently
d) Process focus
• Effectiveness
a) Actual output meets desired output
b) Considers long terms strategy
c) Outcome focus
Source : https://leanvoodoo.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/effective-vs-efficient/
 Outcome Variables
3. Citizenship behavior
• 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, is called
citizenship behavior.
 Outcome Variables
4. Withdrawal behavior
• Withdrawal behavior is the set of actions that
employees take to separate themselves from the
organization.

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 Outcome Variables
5. Group cohesion
• Group cohesion is the extent to which members
of a group support and validate one another at
work.
6. Group functioning
• Group functioning refers to the quantity and
quality of a group’s work output.

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 Outcome Variables
7. Productivity
• An organization is productive if it achieves its
goals by transforming inputs into outputs at the
lowest cost. This requires both effectiveness and
efficiency.
8. Survival
• The final outcome is organizational survival,
which is simply evidence that the organization is
able to exist and grow over the long term.

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 Implications for Managers
• Resist generalizations; some provide valid insights into human behavior, but
many are erroneous.

• Use metrics and situational variables rather than “hunches” to explain

cause-and-effect relationships.

• Work on interpersonal skills to increase your leadership potential.

• Improve your technical skills and conceptual skills through training and
staying current with organizational behavior trends e.g. “big data”.

• Organizational behavior can improve employees’ work quality and

productivity - empower your employees, design and implement change
programs, improve customer service, and help employees balance work-life
conflicts.